More than anything, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the frailty of our modern societies in defending us against an unforeseen biological threat – an adaptable virus that caused more than 7 million deaths, according to the WHO. While the past consequences are widely known, what have we learned five years later? More importantly, what would be different today if another outbreak broke out? In 2020, the only viable response was consecutive lockdowns, with a huge impact on the health (and mental health) of the populations, besides economic and societal effects. The problem was, and still is, that in an environment where infected people coexist, there is absolutely no solution that prevents infection. This prevention strategy is even more important before the first vaccines are developed, which, for COVID-19, was a record of one year after the outbreak. This is the challenge that Delox is ambitiously tackling: amidst a pandemic, how can a group of people be together in a closed space without getting infected? The answer, albeit apparently obvious, is technically challenging. We need constant bio-decontamination of the air – if we are constantly eliminating the virus from the air, we are constantly breathing clean air, and by clean, we mean free from bacteria, fungi, or an epidemic-causing virus. Now, the most important question arises. How do we achieve this? Our answer is to develop a bio-decontamination system that retrofits all HVAC systems, enabling all air in a room to be actively circulated and bio-decontaminated. A word of caution to distinguish between bio-decontamination and simple purification systems. In bio-decontamination, very high amounts of a biocide (by high, it means it would kill everything, human beings included) are introduced in a hospital room, for example, releasing it free from microorganisms. However, a purification system can only improve air quality. To be successful in our approach, we need to bring bio-decontamination to the world of purification: we need a simple system installed in an HVAC, compatible with human presence, that kills microorganisms and thus delivers clean, fresh, and safe air into the room where we are. Our system, DeloxAIR, will be able to be installed in every HVAC system in the world, delivering everyone the possibility of defending against any future endemic, epidemic, or pandemic, and giving our societies the resilience they never possessed.
