Ok, dumb idea time: suppose that everyone in an office sits on a chair that raises their body to X volts. At the same time a collector mesh is provided at each desk, at -X volts, but shielded so that you can't touch it and shock yourself.
What X is large enough to ensure that all the virus particles you cough out end up at the collector? Is it possible to do this without electrocuting everyone?
The mass difference between humans and viruses is something like 10^19.
So if you take the naive approach -- which is wrong, because charges live on surfaces, not in volumes -- you would want the person to have about a coulumb of charge to ensure that 1 extra electron was allocated to each virus particle.
Whether or not 1 electron per virus is enough is a separate question, but that gives you a lower bound -- if you are allocating, say, 0.1 electrons, only 10% of your virus particles will have a charge.
Edit: so, given the capacitance of humans as 200 pF, that would be 5 gigavolts?
Using the size of aerosolized droplets (0.35-10um) and the mass of human skin (20 lbs) would knock two orders of magnitude off, and drop the floor estimate to 50 megavolts.
For anyone wondering what a 50MV source looks like, one was actually built out in the desert near Joshua Tree in '54. Strangely, it was built for longevity research. Well, that and UFOs and anti-gravity, because of course:
"The Multiple Wave Oscillator is a combination of a high voltage Tesla coil and a split-ring resonator that generates ultra wideband electromagnetic frequencies."
The ionization of the air in the main room was quite intense, with plasma freely forming coronas.
Once the pandemic is over, you can drive out to get a 'sound bath' in the room, if you are so inclined.
Re: capacitance, our capacitance is too low. The higher the capacitance the lower the voltage. A 1 farad capacitor could hold 1 coulomb of charge at 1 volt of potential difference. A 0.1 farad capacitor could hold 0.1 coulomb of charge at 1 volt, or 1 coulomb of charge at 10 volts, or 0.01 coulombs of charge at 0.1 volts, or 100 coulombs of charge at 1000 volts.[0]. Because our capacitance is so low, you need a huge amount of voltage to force all of those electrons onto us.
[0] Assuming the capacitor didn't fail -- in the case of actual capacitors, they only operate within certain parameters and tend to explode outside of them, in the case of people in an atmosphere, you'd probably see those discharges well before you managed to shove a full coulomb of charge onto one.
Free electrons tend to distribute themselves on an object as to minimize the repulsive forces between them. This usually means that they distribute evenly on the surface of objects.
Humans are a bit more complicated in structure than say a metal ball, but my guess would be that there would be a similar situation where all the free electrons would just build up on the skin. Therefore, I don't think the particles one would cough up would be negatively charged.
Alveoli are basically small air sacs in your lungs, so they're a surface (it's just an inverted ball, a hollow sphere in a not-so-solid object).
No idea how that influences where the electrons go.
I wonder how the nervous system would interact with that as synapses fire. I'm curious if they would build up, or if the synapses all over the body firing would make them bounce around constantly.
> Alveoli are basically small air sacs in your lungs, so they're a surface
> No idea how that influences where the electrons go.
Electrons don't specifically move toward surfaces, they move to be as far apart from each other, so internal surfaces don't count significantly. Saying they move toward surfaces is only true for convex objects (and they are evenly distributed when the object is a sphere).
In the human body, they'll move toward extremities: hands, feet, tips of hairs, ...
The latter is an easy to observe effect of static electricity, charges will apply pressure on the hairs and make them straight so they are as far away from the rest of the charges as possible. See the first image here for example: https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/item/how-does-static-...
This seems to assume that virus particles are charged. If they are neutral, they wouldn't be driven in any direction by an electric field. Am I missing something? Is it known that virus particles have a charge?
I think you are missing the OP's assumption that by raising the subject's entire body to +X Volts, any virus particles they breath out will start out with this same positive charge. I'm not sure this assumption is true, but it seems plausible.
What X is large enough to ensure that all the virus particles you cough out end up at the collector? Is it possible to do this without electrocuting everyone?