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Even better: the reuse of gold and silver coinage for legal tender.

Appealing, but a coin the weight of a UK penny made of 18-carat gold would be worth a bit over 130 USD. Not sure how practical that would be for buying a hot dog.

Well after civilisation collapses in the UK, a hot dog will cost about 130 USD, so that will be pretty handy actually.

I'm all for brass, as long as it's one of the lead-free alloys.

Unfortunately viruses are not microorganisms.

The Wikipedia page focused specifically on antimicrobial effects of copper calls out that it has some effect on viruses. I don’t know enough to say if this is the same as the oligodynamic effect or just something similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...

COVID-19 doesn't "survive" very long on copper surfaces.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

It's unclear to me whether this applies to viruses, much less this particular virus.