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The Almighty Buck China Medicine

China Quarantines Cash to Sanitize Old Bank Notes From Coronavirus (msn.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the non-virtual-currencies dept.
Today China announced it was taking unusual new steps to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. It's blocking the transfer of old bank notes between provinces and cities affected by the outbreak, according to the deputy governor of the People's Bank of China — and that's just the beginning.

Bloomberg reports: The central bank also ramped up measures to sanitize old money to reduce contagion risks and added 600 billion yuan ($85.9 billion) of new cash for Hubei, the epicenter of the coronavirus, he said.

"Money from key virus-hit areas will be sanitized with ultraviolet rays or heated and locked up for at least 14 days, before it is distributed again," Fan said at a press conference on Saturday. Money circulated in less riskier areas is subject to a week of quarantine and commercial lenders have been asked to separate cash from hospitals and food markets, he said.

The share of cash in broad money supply has dropped steadily in recent years in China, with the rise of mobile payments largely replacing bank notes in daily life.
"It's an extreme move that makes sense," argues Quartz: Whether it's dollars, pounds, euros, shekels, or in this case yuan, currency is notoriously dirty. A 2017 study [PDF] of $1 bills in New York found some 397 bacterial species living on the surface. And when someone with the flu handles it, that virus has been shown to survive for up to 12 days.

The World Health Organization has said that it is still not known how long the the coronavirus can survive on surfaces and objects, including money. Preliminary information has shown it can survive a few hours or more, but can be killed with basic disinfectants.
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China Quarantines Cash to Sanitize Old Bank Notes From Coronavirus More

China Quarantines Cash to Sanitize Old Bank Notes From Coronavirus

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  • Las Vegas (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dantoo ( 176555 ) on Saturday February 15, 2020 @09:47PM (#59732154)

    Las Vegas is the best place to have this stuff cleaned. If they send enough of it through they can even get a free room.

    • Chinese equivalent is Macau, unfortunately they locked the border and closed all the casinos(which basically amounts to their entire economy)

    • Replacing worn-out bills with new is one of the basic functions of any central bank. All China is doing is temporarily accelerating this process to limit the spread of virus.

  • Happy Golden Money Laundromat (Score:5, Funny)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Saturday February 15, 2020 @10:00PM (#59732184)
    So now they're into money laundering. Great.

  • that makes perfect sense. Surely you wouldn't take cash out of circulation and replace it with anything but sanitized bills.

    Hey,.. maybe you should rename the new currency. No one will notice or suspect a thing.

  • The 14 day observation period for suspected infected people has NOTHING to do with the virus outside a human body. If money is truly disinfected then it can be immediately used, there is no purpose to letting sit for 14 days.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The "or heated and locked up for at least 14 days"...
      They can not be sure the heat is going to work on all bulk amounts of cash been treated.
      14 days is the backup plan for the parts that did not get heated.

      • Coronavirus can only live for like three days on surfaces. Two weeks is overkill even if they aren't doing anything to treat the money. The virus is just an excuse for slowing down cash transactions.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by AHuxley ( 892839 )
          A Communist gov gets to enjoy the reduction in cash and the "healthy" move to easy to track/block digital banking.

        • Well, if you collect money like this, it is usually put into counting machines, that spit out bundles of stacked money. E.g. 50 $100 bills. The virus between the paper bills will survive much longer than the ones outside.

    • Paper money is a special case. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday February 15, 2020 @11:32PM (#59732262) Homepage Journal

      The cotton paper used in paper currency is fibrous and presents a surface that has been shown to enable microorganisms like S. aureus (a bacteria) and influenza (a virus) to survive for considerably longer than they would on a smooth surface like glass. Paper money also tends to get pretty grimy too; it's not like you can really say what the surface of currency is like in the real world. It could be covered in ketchup for all you know. Or somebody's bodily fluids.

      There's a lot of unknowns here, but let me be clear: this is not something I would *personally* worry about. That doesn't necessarily mean that worrying about this *in aggregate* is stupid.

      There is probably at least some element of security theater going on here, but it's not *completely* unreasonable to consider currency as a vector. If it is possible to transmit COVID-19 that way, it's apt to be like winning the lottery. The odds are so low it's not worth worrying about individually, but eventually somebody does hit the jackpot.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Also the banks and gov may want to have their security features not heated up too much too quickly over vast amounts of money put back into use by the gov.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by makomk ( 752139 )

        You know what else has a fibrous, rough surface? Lots of packages leaving China. The WHO and China have been insistent that they're perfectly safe, but if banknotes are something we have to worry about being infectious for up to 14 days after being sterilized, those packages are certainly something we should worry about too.

        • The packages take a while.
          And they only go through a handful of hands.
          Paper money easy can go through a handful or more hands every single day.

      • "Paper money also tends to get pretty grimy too; it's not like you can really say what the surface of currency is like in the real world. It could be covered in ketchup for all you know. Or somebody's bodily fluids."

        It's disgusting. People handling food should not be allowed to touch the stuff.

        • It's disgusting. People handling food should not be allowed to touch the stuff.
          In some countries they aren't allowed. And depending on size of the shop, the people making the food and the people delivering it to the table and the cashier are different persons anyway.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
            And usually it results in a false sense of security, as the idiot who wears gloves to not touch the food wears the same damned pair of gloves all day long and has no problem touching absolutely everything with those gloves, and your food too. There's more to asepsia than just gloves. Personally I'd be more at ease if I knew the person washed their hands regularly, but there's no way to control that other than hoping the manager isn't a pig and doesn't hire pigs.

      • Doesn't matter, heated to some degrees before ignition temperature, say 150 deg C, and everything is going to be killed. Viruses like anything else carrying code for living thing are fragile and get destroyed.

        • That would work, but there is so much plastic in notes it would probably also melt or at least get discolored. Would be interesting to try though.
      • I get that bacteria can live on paper, but has money been shown to get anyone sick, ever? A quick Google search doesn't show any conclusive case (maybe I should have used Bing?).

        This is making me paranoid enough that now I want to soak all my cash in rubbing alcohol.
    • The virus does degrade with time, quite quickly in fact. Letting it gather dust for a while is an effective disinfection method. Drenching it in bleach or something would work, but would also destroy the notes.
  • Visa! You pay 3% more for everything because of us!
    • Well tha assumes the cost of handling cash (including but not limited to risk if recieving fakes) is 0, well it is not, I fore one would welcome a cash (physical) free society, there are also debit cards, negating the visa/mc fee. Oh yea we are being tracked waaa waaa, well tho only thing being tracked, unless someone connect tow dbs that they generally are not allowed to connect without a warrant is when, whete and how much you used.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        The cost of handling cash is much less than 3%.

        Debit cards certainly do charge fees. More than credit, depending on the card and transaction type.

        Credit cards are tied to your phones are track you everywhere, all of the time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Cash is a right of payment. You have cash, you can pay for what you want and have it, no questions asked. Forced corporation transaction cards, is slavery, you must obey else when your ask permission to have something it will be denied, even when it is your own money. In any dispute, you can guess the initial first step, putting a hold on your transaction account, and then an appointment two days latter and then let's negotiate, you agree or we can try a 30 DAY resolution process and see if you break by the

  • To Protect the People from the Coronavirus the government seizes all accounts of all kinds. Converts them to cash, sanitizes the cash, and then recreates the account and returns it to the owner minus a small tiny hardly noticeable clean up fee.

    Poof!! unexpected revenue ;)

    Just my 2 cents ;)
    • Crow flu.

    • "Hardly noticeable"? In the USA, which admittedly uses quite expensive paper for our money, the cost of printing a $1 is roughly 5 cents. The cost of printing a $100 is roughly fifteen cents. Even if we assume that most Chinese money is in the equivalent of alrger bills such as $100 bills, as soon as we factor in the handlin gcosts of transporting and replacing all those bills, we can assume easily assume double the cost per bill.

      A 10 cent tax on every dollar bill, or a 30 cent tax on every hundred dollar b

  • They could just burn it and reprint the batches they destroyed. As long as it's a 1:1 transaction, nobody would bat an eye. The US and other countries do exactly that even in non-wartime, once money gets back to a bank, it gets processed, destroyed and the mint prints new currency.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      No gov wants to ramp up printing by that much.
      They have enough trusted secure printing sites to cover generational use per decade.
      Not enough to "burn it and reprint the batches" in vast amounts.
      Its not "a" town and a few village areas that are now needing cash cleaning services..

    • Printing money is _expensive_. The Terry Pratchett story "Making Money" did a startlingly good job of exploring the difficulties of printing money.

      > The US and other countries do exactly that even in non-wartime,

      They do this with physically _worn out_ money. which is much less of the money in circulation.

    • Worn out notes get trashed obviously, the rest just go back to circulation. Now they can't do it anymore, at least not right away. Stockpile them for a while, the virus will degrade with time.
  • Yes, because we all know that since we have found that it takes up to 14 days for the virus to be detected once a human is infected that the same amount of time is how long the virus is viable on a surface before it can no longer infect someone...

    This is about as stupid as stupid gets if someone thinks that this works. Has someone actually studied how long this virus can last on a surface before it is no longer infectious? I know I haven't seen a report on such a matter, and have not seen anything publishe
    • I don't think they use that rationale for the quarantine period, the limit is probably how long they can hold them until cash shortages become a problem and it happens to be 14 days. No studies for this specific virus, but studies have been done for other similar viruses including SARS. Seems like it depends on temperature and humidity, at normal room conditions 14 days should be enough, at low temperatures and both extremely dry or humid conditions it might not be.

  • I have a storage shed they can use.

  • I'm not sure what kind of money they use in China, but if we want to keep circulating cash this is a good argument for using coins instead of bills. Copper alloys are particularly antimicrobial [wikipedia.org], and the linked article says they are proven effective against some viruses. Silver can do this some too, but apparently not as well. Who knows, this virus might be the thing that finally gets us to use dollar coins in the US... not that I'm particularly looking forward to that.

    • Chinese 1 yuan coins have nickel plating, pretty sure it has no effect on viruses, nor does any other type of coin metal. Viruses are inanimate outside a cell. Some metals especially copper have antibacterial properties though, but that has no relevance to this epidemic.

      • RTFL I posted. Copper actually has demonstrated anti viral as well as antibacterial properties. Of course this virus is too new for us to know if copper would help, but they've tested it with at least one flu strain and it's effective.

    • A virus is not a microbe ... biology 101.

  • currency is notoriously dirty

    So is a dictator being able to turn off your life by flipping a bit. It's positively beastly, in fact.

  • Wow, what a lot of fuckwits there are on Slashdot.

    This event would be a good opportunity to replace fibre-sheet currency with plastic-based currency, but that's generally a project that takes some years to carry out, so ... opportunity missed. Shame.

    • More plastic into the environment. Just what we need.

      • I don't know about you, but I'm fairly careful about not throwing fivers and tenners (have 20s been replaced with plastic issues yet? Not sure, I'll check next time I have one on hand.) out loose into the environment.
  • China is known for taking unique approaches and innovation in every field. So, when they have struck into the virus problem, they showcased their innovation by making a hospital for coronavirus infected people in just 10 days and now they are sanitizing old bank notes.

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