My family has been decontaminating our N95 masks with ozone. I bought a battery-operated O3 generator and if you place it into a tupperware container along with the mask, it will decontaminate it and then you can use it the next day. Yale School of Medicine has done a study on the efficacy of this method. [1]
I prefer this method because it doesn't degrade the mask at all, it needs no disinfecting/harsh chemicals, it penetrates into the pores of the mask completely, and it's near fool-proof.
Ozone is an extremely harsh disinfectant chemical, and it's dangerous to say it's not. Various regulatory agencies in the USA set prolonged exposure limits at about 0.1ppm. [1] The USA's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has set its Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health (IDLH) concentration for ozone as 5ppm.
This study you've linked examines the disinfectant power (against Pseudomonas aeruginosa) of ozone at a concentration of 400ppm. If somebody who's been told that ozone is not a harsh chemical decides to open that airtight container and smell the sanitation, they might get a whiff of ozone so concentrated that doctors around the world will be talking about the resulting injury.
Even if you're careful not to do that, opening the container may cause a significant and harmful elevation of ozone concentration in the room if this is done indoors.
Wow this is actually incredible if this works. However this study was tested bacteria and relate it to covid in the following way:
"an ozone application achieves a high level of disinfection against PsA, a vegetative bacteria that the CDC identifies as more difficult to kill than medium sized viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19)"
Would the implication be that this same method works on covid as well? That is not immediately apparent to me...
It sounds like it's saying "ozone kills the tougher bacteria than Covid at a very high rate".
So directly it says absolutely nothing about Covid but implicitly it does seem to state that it should also kill Covid since it's less tough to kill than the vegetative bacteria. I guess they can't make that statement directly--there's no evidence related to Covid here. I'd ignore it.
Maybe the mechanism of death is similar so if it kills a more difficult strain the same mechanism will kill the "easier strain". It doesn't directly state it though, I think it's just speculation. It doesn't belong in a science paper except maybe in a speculative section about the future I guess.
Hi, this is exactly the same model that I got. Mine has a different branding on but many sellers seem to have re-branded the same white-label model from China. They work well. They generate ozone for 30 min and then for 5 min every hour until the battery runs out. It has a micro USB battery charging port.
You can search for them by using the model number (ST-807A) or by searching for "ozone generator fridge" on your fav shopping sites.
I prefer this method because it doesn't degrade the mask at all, it needs no disinfecting/harsh chemicals, it penetrates into the pores of the mask completely, and it's near fool-proof.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20097402v...