Initial suggestions were that with the changing of seasons and rising temperatures, the outspread of COVID-19 will dwindle down rapidly, and eventually, the pandemic will cease. All the WhatsApp universities and even a few official reports had confirmed the news earlier. Contradictory, summer has already arrived in many COVID-19 affected regions but the graph is not willing to flatten rather only heightening ever since. In fact, many other pieces of evidence have been found against this.
Concept of weather and COVID-19
A somewhat thought behind summer wiping out the stubborn coronavirus was that cold and influenza typically circulate more easily in the winter season because the air intent to be drier. However, during summer, the air holds more moisture, and virus particles don’t travel distant in the humidity.
“Those little particles in the air get soggy and collapse to the floor,” said Penn State University biologist, Katriona Shea, at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. “That’s not a technical description”, he further added.
Further, Hazhir Rahmandad, an MIT associate professor of system dynamics illustrated
“Weather alone cannot quench the epidemic in summer, even though it does help reduce the transmission rates to some extent.”
After studying COVID-19 cases from at least 3,700 different locations across the globe, experts deduced that the effect of weather on the virus outspread is not much considerable. They rather said, “Epidemic growth of COVID-19 was not associated with latitude and temperature, but maybe [negatively] associated weakly with relative or absolute humidity.”
Reports from a Canadian research
Recently, Canadian researchers published a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on 144 geopolitical areas worldwide (3,75,609 cases) with at least 10 Covid-19 cases and local transmission by March 20. The journal, excluding China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy, examined countries mostly in the northern hemisphere, near sea level, with temperate climates; the median temperature was 12.8°C and the median relative humidity was 69.0%.
The study clearly focused on the fact that seasonality only has a minor role to play in the spread of COVID-19. Rather, taking measures such as social distancing, reduced mass gatherings, the closing of schools, and universities, lockdowns impact the growth of this virus more efficiently.
