Acidifying the air may protect against covid

sign a respiratory disease is doing the rounds is a rise in sales of vinegar. Folk medicine says that when you boil it, the acetic-acid-rich fumes clear the air of whatever nastiness is bringing on the cough. And there may be a grain of truth in this belief, for one sure way to render airborne viruses, such as -o-2, the cause of covid-19, harmless, is to make the droplets of fluid which carry them more acidic.Tamar Kohn of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and Thomas Peter of its Zurich counterpart, reckon, though, that this can be done well only by a stronger acid than acetic—nitric, for example. They observe in a study just published in that once inside a droplet, nitric acid creates conditions which viruses find really hard to take.