Does COVID-19 Go Away as Temperature Warms?
- Shaili Sinha
- Apr 3, 2021
- 2 min read
Title: Does Covid-19 go away when the temperature warms?
You may have heard on the news people were addressing that Covid-19 may go away when the temperature starts to get warmer. But is that information accurate? Not necessarily.
Many researchers have been studying the common cold in hopes to get hints about how the Covid-19 virus might behave. Their findings suggested that the summer may not save us and we would need to have repeated periods of social distancing.
The viruses HCoV-OC43 and HCV-HKU1 are the ones that cause the common cold. Based on that, a model was developed that examined potential seasonality, the impact of social-distancing strategies, and the virus’s future role in causing illness. They looked at scenarios in which a vaccine or a treatment was not created.
So in each scenario, they looked at, they found out that warm weather doesn’t do a thing to stop Covid-19. This is because people who get the common cold can develop immunity by spring. But with Covid-19, too many people are vulnerable, causing it to continue to spread in the warmer months too.
“It exists,” Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and one of the paper’s authors, said of the seasonal decline in cases illustrated by the work, “but it’s also certainly not enough of a seasonal fluctuation … to lead it to go away in the summer in the absence of intervention.”
Basically, the effect of weather on Covid-19 is low, and in terms of relative importance, the weather is one of the last parameters. The virus might spread because of human behavior and not of temperature and humidity.
A recent study by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health used a combination of weather information and data on human movement and behaviors (including mask-wearing) to estimate the degree of how the weather might affect Covid-19. They concluded that the relative importance of weather on disease transmission at the county level was just 3 percent, compared to 34 percent for taking trips, 26 percent for spending time away from home, 23 percent for population, and 13 percent for urban density.
The weather may help other viruses, but not for this one. Sure, the weather may play little influence, but it’s not enough to prevent it.
We should continue to social distance, wear your mask, and practice the appropriate safety measures to keep you and everyone safe. With the vaccine coming out, we might return to the “new normal”.
Thank you for reading! I hope you have learned something new today!
See you next time, Shaili
Sources:
댓글