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Quote:The Miami Dolphins’ No. 1 advantage over their competition in 2020 might not be their star rookie quarterback or their new-look coaching staff.

Rather, it might be the air they breathe.

The Dolphins recently became the first franchise in football to install a series of new air purification devices throughout their team headquarters designed to wipe out the coronavirus before it lands on a surface or ends up in their players’ lungs.

And they are using one of the safest — and most natural — disinfectants on the planet: ultraviolet rays.

Over the coming weeks and months, a company called Healthe Lighting — which includes Dolphins owner Stephen Ross among its investors — will retrofit the team’s facility with a series of UV-C lights and filters that the business says can eliminate virtually all of the coronavirus in the environment.

“From my perspective, and a whole bunch of people I speak with regularly, this is the best tool we have today [to fight coronavirus],” said Fred Maxik, Healthe’s founder and chief technology officer. “We can go in and clean, we can go in and scrub, but at the end of the day, the first sick person that goes into that space, that space is contaminated again. The systems that we’re deploying are systems that are cleaning in real time and cleaning constantly. We reduce that [pathogen] load that’s in that space to the maximum to we can.”

Healthe’s multi-level system is designed to inactivate the virus in the air, on players’ lockers and even on their uniforms — and it’s all completely safe, researchers say.

How so? Maxik — whose technology is aboard the International Space Station, cleans Seattle’s Space Needle and helped saved the trapped Chilean miners — and his team have found a way to utilize a certain UV wavelength that doesn’t negatively impact human skin or eyes.

It’s called Far-UV-C, or 222 nanometers, and while developers have known of the wavelength’s potential for years, it took a pandemic for developers to truly tap into its promise.

“It’s a well-proven, extremely safe technology that is underused and often misunderstood,” Edward Nardell, professor in the Harvard Departments of Environmental Health and Immunology and Infectious Diseases, recently told NPR. “No one doubts the efficacy of germicidal UV in killing small microorganisms and pathogens. I think the bigger controversy, if there is any, is mis-perceptions around safety.”

Healthe already has begun installing a series of ceiling devices inside the Dolphins’ locker room called troffers, featuring HEPA-Carbon activated filtration with UV sanitization. Essentially, the mechanism sucks in infected air, runs it through a filtration system, and then spits it out essentially pathogen-free, the company says.