>Better equipped hospitals: more respirators, ecmo.

And better supply chain tracking, I am looking for UV-C LED's and products containing them (desinfection equipment, like baby bottle desinfectors, desinfection boxes for CPAP masks and hospital equipment, desinfection lamps, ...)

Disturbingly even here in the west, going through sponsored advertisements on ebay local pages (named marktplaats.nl in the netherlands) I can easily find 20 euro desinfection lamps, supposedly 12W, having 65 LED's.

That is

1) surprisingly cheap: trying to find UV-C LED's through farnell, digikey etc that would easily cost 300 euros for the LED's alone assuming 250+ unit prices (5 euro's per LED).

2) surprisingly high radiant fluxes: 12W for 65 LED's gives ~ 200mW per "UV-C" LED, whereas most datasheets for real UV-C LED's would show just a handful of mW per UV-C LED.

If ANYONE can find me ~180mW UV-C LED's priced well below 0.30 Euros at bulk rates, please respond where, as I may be wrong and such incredulous products are perhaps not incredulous, but I would need proof.

Knowing that such prices and specs are totally realistic for UV-A (note the A), I can not help but think that somewhere someone decided it was a good idea to build UV-C type products by using UV-A LED's, both would cause fluorescence and phosphorescense on such materials and would be hard to distinguish as a user.

So now a large number of consumers, and possibly companies or even hospitals (!) might genuinely believe they are sterilizing surfaces because the products were incorrectly advertised as UV Germicidal Irradiation products.

All for what? A new garage door? A Tesla?

It truly is a dark world.

So I predict there will come a "UV-C Provenance" protocol where:

1) the genuine UV-C LED chip manufacturer keeps a cadastre of ownership of UV-C LED's

2) resellers or product manufacturers must contact the original chip manufacturer with the buyer's email to transfer ownership of a number of contained LED's when selling

3) original UV-C LED manufacturers must contact the buyer to ask for confirmation of receipt of the UV-C LED (or the product that contained such a number of LED's)

4) resellers or product manufacturers may not use the "UV-C provenance" logo if the product does not actually use UV-C LEDs, if they can not prove the provenance by referencing unsold LED's in their name with the chip manufacturer, or if they don't perform their roles above

5) governments perform regular randomized trials of buying "UV-C LED" branded products, and measure the wavelength to verify truthfulness, with hefty fines for violations

One might think that a product designer could order genuine UV-C LED's, not use them, order UV-A LED's to use in the product, sell as if they were UV-C, and then afterwards sell their genuine stock. However who would be interested in this (genuine) stock if this hypothetical buyer can not sell the genuine stock under the "UV-C provenance" logo without corresponding UV-C provenance tokens?

BTW I am not trying to scare people away from UV-C LED desinfection equipment, they are better in many respects to mercury lamps, for example they don't generate ozone. The problem is the UV-A LED's being foisted off as UV-C LED's

Also, if anyone reading this happens to be one of the people involved in substituting UV-A for UV-C LED's in a product or advertisement: you can run but you can't hide, they are going to find you, regardless of your nationality, religion, ... by this time it is an international crisis.