Antibacterial wipes will not kill the virus!

[Bottletopsx]

I am seeing many people on here saying that they are wiping down shopping, door handles etc with anti bac wipes. This is a waste of time against covid 19 as the wipes will only kill bacteria not a virus.

You should be using soap and water or bleach to wipe down with and soap and water to wash your hands.

I found a bottle of Dettol spray at the back of mu cleaning cupboard. Grateful to have it now... apparently kills 99.9% of everything bacterial and viral.

As viruses are not living in the first place, you can't kill them. The main point of washing is to reduce the viral load on your skin in order to prevent infection. This is also the reason for wiping down surfaces etc. Soap will damage a virus.

You need to look at the ingredients, manufacturers use the term antibacterial as a catch all because consumers understand it and it covers infections which are viral too (I work in marketing, and DF is an industrial chemist) but their product will work on viruses as well in a lot of instances.

Sometimes it will say on the packaging the specific microbes it’s been tested against but if not there should be a data sheet online. But you can tell by the ingredients. if something works and has been tested against cold or flu then it’s very safe to assume it will work on Covid-19 as the various chemicals all work in the same way which is by breaking down the fatty coating which surrounds the virus which deactivates it. For instance Dettol works on the flu virus and noro virus in the same way even though they’re a different viruses, as does a 70% alcohol solution or a bleach solution. Enveloped viruses are a lot easier to deactivate than some bacteria which is alive and take something like Listeria is pretty bloody hardy.

You need to follow the instructions tho as done will have a kill time, Dettol Is on contact though I believe.

Also wipes will manually wipe some virus particles away as well so you’ll decrease the viral load that way also.

Thank you @Emmabridgewater20

Any wipe with detergent/soap that can break up lipids (fats) will have some effectiveness.

I went through my cleaning sprays yesterday, googled their active ingredients vs covid and found most of my sprays/wipes won’t work!!! Going to be sticking to wiping down with rubbing alcohol or diluted bleach or sprays with bleach in them from now on...