There have been several newspaper announcements that coronaviruses are inactivated by catechins in tea.
There was also a paper that calculated the binding energy of such herbs and coronaviruses.(Identification of Dietary Molecules as Therapeutic Agents to Combat COVID-19 Using Molecular Docking Studies)
Hansen Solubility Parameters (HSP) are calculated as follows. Suppose we have a polymer and a combination of solvents that dissolve the polymer and solvents that do not.
The dissolving solvent is placed inside the Hansen sphere and the insoluble solvent is placed outside the sphere. And we define the center of the sphere as the HSP of the polymer.
If you have a solvent with known HSP, and there is some difference, you can find the HSP of the polymer by “pinch method”.
The HSP of herbs can be calculated by YMB if the structure is known.
And the binding energies are in the paper.
This means that the HSP of coronaviruses can be calculated.
The polarization term (dP) and hydrogen bonding term (dH) are larger than I expected. I wonder if it is necessary to have such a high polarity HSP in order to attach to areas that are always wet, such as the throat.
The large dispersion term (dD) comes from the fact that it interacts strongly with polyphenols such as catechins. This is because aromatics have a large dD.
This calculation is not yet available in the current version 5.3. It was calculated with the 2019 parameters at hand. We are working on a new version as soon as possible.