VERIFY: Sanitize your cloth masks in the washing machine, not the microwave

[ProfessorGAC]

61. You're The One Who Mentioned Bulk Temperature

In the other post. At the molecular level, steam is steam.
I will acknowledge that some nucleic acids are short chain with double bonds. Those double bonds would be susceptible to excitation from microwave.
The industry experimented for a while using microwave oven for solids testing.
Things with carbon-sulfur bonds, or C-O-S bonds would char. The electronegativity of those bonds were highly excitable, but there is little to none of those sort of bonds in cotton, paper or viruses.
I will stand corrected if the results show that the nucleic acids were fractured in the virus. I don't envision the spectrochemistry that denatures the protein in this amount of time.
The most sensitive bonds are those with an exposed oxygen. It's why alcohol or sugar heats up.
Absent the hydroxyl or ether linkage, the excitation is highly unlikely.