The Far-UVC Awareness Gap

Far-UVC could slow down pandemics. Early far-UVC customers are enthusiastic. Most people have never heard of it.

Owen did this work during a pilot BlueDot program. More details coming soon.

Bottom line up front: I spent a week reaching out to far-UVC users. Everybody I spoke to was enthusiastic about the lamps they’d bought, in many cases having used them for years. Nevertheless, most people don’t know about far-UVC. So it seems likely that there’s a substantial market opportunity in selling far-UVC to people who match an ideal customer profile but don’t know about it yet.

Executive summary

• Far-UVC is a type of light that is dangerous to most pathogens and probably safe to people. If adopted widely enough, it could be highly effective in reducing respiratory disease transmissions.

• To better understand what’s standing in the way of wider adoption, I interviewed people who use far-UVC lamps.

• Everybody I spoke to was enthusiastic about their lamps, believing them to be doing a good job in reducing infections and increasing the productivity of their workplaces.

• Most people I spoke to didn’t know anybody else using far-UVC, signaling a possible unrealized opportunity for further adoption.

• Some people have serious safety concerns, because other UV wavelengths are known to cause cancer.

• Customers are clustered within particular industries where infections are especially harmful to the bottom line.

• Though it would be expensive to outfit an entire building with far-UVC, users anecdotally found success by targeting their highest-risk spaces.

• There are varying theories as to why we haven’t seen more adoption yet.

Far-UVC is a wavelength of light that can kill most pathogens, but is generally considered safe to humans. This makes it a promising technology for air disinfection: for example, a far-UVC experiment showed it cutting airborne Staph bacteria at a rate equivalent to changing the room’s air 184 times per hour, whereas hospital ventilation systems only change air 6-12 times per hour. In a best-case future, far-UVC could be widely deployed in indoor spaces, potentially helping to prevent millions of yearly deaths and billions of yearly GDP loss from respiratory illnesses, and to mitigate damages from future pandemics.

Demand for far-UVC lamps spiked during Covid, but they seem to have fallen out of the public mind since then. What would need to happen to bring us into that best-case world, where you can trust that your air is disinfected anywhere you go? To get closer to an answer, I spent the past week calling people who bought far-UVC lamps, either during Covid or after, among the few I could find online. I also spoke to people on the production side, aiming to understand what’s working well with this technology and what its biggest challenges are.

(For further background, see BlueDot’s UV air disinfection doc.)

Observations

I only reached out to users who were excited enough about their far-UVC systems that they made their purchase publicly known via news articles, testimonials on the seller’s website, tweets, etc. Among these, I only spoke to those who let me interview them. Because of this, I wouldn’t generalize any conclusions drawn from these observations, but I think they’re meaningful anyway – within each of the many industries I talked to, there are people who continue to think that far-UVC solves a pressing business need.

A motivation for these conversations was that we didn’t know whether any of these far-UVC lamps were still in use. We had a short list of news articles about people buying them, but they were mostly written during Covid, and they were all about recent purchases. Realistically, most people could have forgotten about their lamps some time after buying them, leaving them to collect dust.

Among the customers I spoke to, this was not the case. Even those who first purchased their lamps 5 years ago still use them today (or had upgraded them) and consider them an important part of their business’s biosecurity system. A military base was an exception: their lamps are still in place, but have mostly been switched off due to concerns about cancer risk.

Those I interviewed felt that their far-UVC lamps have successfully reduced infections. The Homeless Alliance, for example, saw a 4% Covid transmission rate after installing their lamps, compared to a 20% rate city-wide. Others tell stories of never seeing any infections in treated rooms, or seeing a major reduction from previous infection rates. But nobody has any data from a large-scale, rigorous, real-world study, because none have been done yet. We only know, from lab experiments, that far-UVC quickly cuts down the number of pathogens in the air in controlled settings. There are numerous confounding factors that make it hard to pin down any infection reductions on far-UVC, which the users I spoke to were quick to point out – most who are serious enough to install these lamps have other layers in their biosecurity system, like good ventilation. You also can’t trace where your employees spend all their time, and you can’t track down where somebody gets sick.

Beyond the military base, the degree of safety concerns varied quite a bit. Seattle’s Space Needle first bought far-UVC towards the beginning of Covid, and has continued to buy more over the years, but they faced early resistance from both visitors and employees. This pressure was enough for them to roll back graphics that advertised the new far-UVC system, and to offer UV-proof shirts and glasses to the ~5% of employees who were worried. But most other places had no complaints about safety risks.

Another interesting pattern was that most people, though enthusiastic about their own far-UVC, didn’t know of any other organizations who had any. They seemed surprised by this – they all thought that their far-UVC lamps were contributing positively to their own businesses, and couldn’t see any particular reasons why their peer organizations wouldn’t see the same benefits if they tried.

Nearly all of the organizations I found that had bought far-UVC lamps had a clear, strong financial incentive to minimize disease transmissions within their walls. Types of organizations include:

• Hospitals, which see a lot of sick people and need to minimize pathogen spread

• Farms, where a disease outbreak among the animals hurts the bottom line

• Homeless shelters, where vulnerable populations congregate in close quarters

• Attractions that see thousands of people per day, where workers are at unusually high risk of getting sick due to sheer number of interactions

• Places where physical presence and fitness is vital, like the military

• Schools, since children easily get sick

Further, it’s often too expensive to outfit your whole space with lamps. Those I spoke with were highly intentional in prioritizing their lamp placements, targeting the highest-risk spots. These are usually places with unusually high density of people, like elevators and check-in desks, or places with poor airflow. Pig Hill Farms uses most of their lamps where outside pathogens threaten to come inside: entryways and supply rooms.

A last note – less of an observation and more of a commonly held sentiment – was that far-UVC might just be too unobtrusive to easily catch on. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, and its goal is to simply maintain the status quo. No matter how useful the technology is, there’s not really anything to notice about it.

Takeaways

To me, the strangest finding was that so many people are enthusiastic about their own far-UVC systems but don’t know anybody else using one. This may indicate an opportunity in the market. Though we’re certainly far from a world where everybody uses far-UVC, we’ve seen that there are specific industries where it fulfills a dire need. Why don’t more major indoor tourist attractions, or more farms, protect their own bottom line with far-UVC?

It’s possible that this is just a sales problem. There are only about a dozen major companies specializing in far-UVC, and none of them have more than 50 employees; most have fewer than 10. Perhaps the industry has simply been too constrained so far for anybody to be able to deploy large-scale, aggressive outbound sales strategies. Given that I found quite positive sentiments among those I cold-called, and that the vast majority of people don’t know what far-UVC is, I would speculate that a strong sales approach would lead to many conversations with persuadable customers. Of course, it’s very possible that this has already been tried, and that even among target industries, far-UVC really only appeals to a small subset of businesses.

Another commonly mentioned problem was the lack of efficacy studies. Everybody has their anecdata, but a lack of highly trustworthy evidence that installing far-UVC will reduce your infection rates may stand in the way of new customers. The lack of long-term safety studies surely make it a harder sell as well.

On the other hand, some see it as more of a problem of public perception. Most people don’t actually form beliefs based on studies. We don’t scrutinize the numerical effectiveness of hand sanitizer, we just use it and feel like it makes us safer. It’s possible that air sanitization earns the same treatment one day, and that the best way to make this happen is through better public communications. It’s not common in the West to care a lot about avoiding sickness, though one could argue that it’s rational to do so, and it was normal for a brief time during Covid – at which point far-UVC sales spiked. If culture shifted in a way that caused people to care more about avoiding the flu and common cold, far-UVC lamps could become significantly more attractive.

There’s also lots of institutional inertia against far-UVC. Some target industries face heavy bureaucracy, like hospitals and the military. Some organizations have a lot of veto points – a school trying to install it could be slowed down or stopped by a single vocal parent. So to some extent, the problem of adoption could just be a problem of time.

But even if the industries that really need far-UVC widely adopt it, it still seems unlikely to become widely adopted in general – the vast majority of businesses do not suffer any direct consequences from transmissions within their space. In a restaurant, for example, if a customer catches something, they’re long gone by the time the symptoms appear. Sellers I’ve spoken to believe that if far-UVC were installed everywhere, it would more than pay for itself – it’s just a coordination problem. This cost-benefit analysis puts numbers to the argument. So if we’re serious about getting far-UVC to be truly widespread, this probably becomes something for the government to tackle. A good approach here could look like stricter building codes that require some number of eACH, rather than directly requiring far-UVC, which is not necessarily ideal for every situation.

Far-UVC is still in early, uncertain times. There aren’t many people working on it, nor many people who know about it. Exciting work on creating more robust data about efficacy and safety is currently in progress; other promising angles of attack are listed in BlueDot’s UV air disinfection doc. But based on these conversations, the angle I’m especially excited about is closing the gap between people who could use far-UVC and people who know it’s an option. For every happy far-UVC customer today, there could plausibly be hundreds of other customers that would greatly benefit from it, but have no idea. Closing this gap could be instrumental in moving past the early adopter phase and into a world where far-UVC is standard infrastructure in certain industries.