Iran Press/ America: Is warm weather suppressing the spread of COVID-19? It’s helping. Heat and humidity — plus the ability of people to get outside — will slow down, but not stop, the spread of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.
“Viral transmission dynamics are complicated,” Dr. Amy Ray, medical director of infection prevention at MetroHealth System, said in an email.
“The warm weather of spring has likely offset that prediction by virtue of people spending time outside. Whether the effect of warm weather is directly impacting viral transmission, rather than indirectly affecting it due to the change in how and where people spend their time, is not known,” he added according to Cleveland.
A recent Harvard study found that warm weather did not completely halt transmission of COVID-19, but transmission could be reduced in warmer months.
Another question is whether COVID-19 will spread seasonally in the same way that colds and influenza do. The coronavirus is in the same family of viruses as those that cause colds and flu.
COVID-19 could become seasonal, with steady numbers in the summer and spikes in fall and winter, when more people have immunity, Shanu Agarwal, chair of infection control at Summa Health, said. Though it’s still uncertain if people who recover from COVID-19 have partial or lifelong immunity.
In 2009, the swine flu pandemic spiked in early summer, then again in early fall. COVID-19 could follow that same pattern, Joan Hall, an epidemiologist with the Summit County Public Health said.
The Southern Hemisphere, and the warmer portions of this country, have seen the active spread of COVID-19 during the hot months, Raed Dweik, Chair of Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic, said in an email.
In Texas, daily new cases rose from late May through the first days of June, according to the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine COVID-19 dashboard. California has experienced an overall upward trend in new cases per day, through early June.
Looking globally, equatorial Brazil has the second-highest number of confirmed cases of any country at more than 700,000. India, also a hot-weather country, has more than 270,000 confirmed cases, according to the Johns Hopkins dashboard.
A new working paper and database compiled by researchers at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions looked at weather and air pollution data at nearly 4,000 worldwide locations, to try to determine how temperature and humidity affected the spread of COVID-19. Average temperatures above 77 degrees are associated with a reduction in the virus’s transmission, the Harvard and MIT paper suggests.
“Our projections suggest warmer times of the year, and locations, may offer a modest reduction in reproductive number, helping with efforts to contain the pandemic,” the authors wrote, But, they cautioned, “weather alone will not be enough to fully contain the transmission of COVID-19.”
104/214
Read More:
Brazil virus deaths top 40,000
Greece reopens for tourists, but UK flights barred for now
Effective vaccine for Coronavirus may never be made; a German virologist claims
