Amesh A. Adalja, MD

[The approval] just gives people more guidance and confidence in the products that they’re using for disinfection purposes against the novel coronavirus. Most of us in the field thought that you didn’t necessarily need a specific product label to claim to have effectiveness because we do have general biological knowledge of coronaviruses and know how to clean surfaces that may be contaminated with the virus. But this provides more guidance for people who may not have a biological knowledge of coronavirus, especially people who buy these sanitation products. I think this gives them a lot more confidence, that the products that they’ve been using have been tested against the novel coronavirus.

The EPA is not going to allow a company to put out a claim unless they actually have data on that specific virus. Now that the EPA has done that, it allows them to market specifically with that indication in their advertising. Before, it was an extrapolation, even though the extrapolation is a valid extrapolation.

Kristin Englund, MD, MLS

Prior to this recent approval, agents approved by the EPA to kill SARS-CoV-2 were approved based upon their ability to kill agents felt to be harder to kill than SARS-CoV-2, as the actual SARS-Co-V-2 was not readily available early on to test agents against it. These two Lysol products are the first to be able to provide direct laboratory testing data as to their effectiveness against SARS-Co-V-2

There are so many cleaning products that are on the market, and not all can provide the killing power necessary to disinfect against emerging pathogens such as SARS-Co-V-2. The CDC and the EPA have grouped viruses into three categories based upon the type of virus (small, non-enveloped; large-non-enveloped; and enveloped). Small, non-enveloped viruses are the hardest to kill. Enveloped are the least resistant to disinfectants, thus easier to kill. To be able to gain EPA approval, if the virus is not yet available, the company had to prove that they could kill viruses in a more difficult category. For SARS-CoV-2, which is an enveloped virus, the agent had to have been proven to kill any of the non-enveloped viruses.

Now we have the virus available for direct testing, and thus agents can prove direct SARS-CoV-2 killing power.

Without any EPA guidance and approval, any [business] could claim [its product] can kill the virus. This approval and verification is critical to making sure businesses, hospitals and the public are able to make informed decisions when buying cleaning and disinfecting products.