Warm weather does not stop coronavirus spreading as researchers warn ‘summer won’t make this go away’
WARM weather does not stop the coronavirus from spreading, say researchers who have warned “summer won’t make this go away”.
The view the battle against the coronavirus could be given a helping hand from the coming warm summer months seems to have been discredited by US and Canadian researchers.
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US President Donald Trump said last month that research had suggested a combination of ultraviolet (UV) light and warmer temperatures killed the virus in just a few minutes.
But the latest study found the transmission risk was only reduced by about 1.5 per cent for every degree Fahrenheit above 77F (25C).
Researchers from the University of Toronto looked at a total of more than 375,600 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US and Canada in March and concluded “summer is not going to make this go away”.
They studied the impact of temperature, humidity, school closures, restrictions of mass gatherings and social distancing on the spread of the disease.
The results indicated no link between temperature with a rise in infections and only a negligible difference between humidity and the number of cases.
Professor Dionne Gesink, an epidemiologist at the Canadian university, said: “Summer is not going to make this go away, it’s important people know that.
Summer is not going to make this go away, it’s important people know that
Professor Dionne Gesink
“On the other hand, the more public health interventions an area had in place, the bigger the impact on slowing the epidemic growth.
“These public health interventions are really important because they’re the only thing working right now to slow the epidemic.”
Co-author Dr Peter Jüni said: “We had conducted a preliminary study that suggested both latitude and temperature could play a role.
“But when we repeated the study under much more rigorous conditions, we got the opposite result.”
Their findings were published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
A separate study by US researchers also came to a similar conclusion although their paper has yet to be published or scrutinised by their peers.
Associate professor of system dynamics at MIT Sloan School of Management Hazhir Rahmandad, who was the lead researcher on the project, studied the datea on virus transmission and weather statistics across more than 3,700 locations between last December and April 22.
He and his team found only a slightly lower transmission risk, about a 1.7 per cent reduction per one degree Fahrenheit, once temperatures rose above 77 degrees F.
Even though high temperatures and humidity can moderately reduce the transmission rates of coronavirus, the pandemic is not likely to diminish solely due to summer weather
Prof Hazhir Rahmandad
Prof Rahmandad said in a statement: “Even though high temperatures and humidity can moderately reduce the transmission rates of coronavirus, the pandemic is not likely to diminish solely due to summer weather.
“Policymakers and the public should remain vigilant in their responses to the health emergency, rather than assuming that the summer climate naturally prevents transmission.
“At best, weather plays only a secondary role in the control of the pandemic.”
The findings were backed up by Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in Baltimore.
He said: “Because this is a novel virus, without population immunity, we can’t expect to see a full suppression of transmission based on seasonality.
“Though certain environmental conditions might be less conducive to spread from surfaces during summer months, the sheer fact that so many people are susceptible may not make as much of a difference because person-to-person spread will continue.
“It will be important that even in the summer months, states remain vigilant regarding the number of cases that are occurring with full situational awareness of the rate of hospitalizations, to prevent hospitals from going into a stress mode of functioning.”
Previously the US government had suggested sunlight may kill off the coronavirus in minutes after an unpublished study by US Department of Homeland Security scientists.
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Their findings suggested radiation given off by UV rays could damage the virus’ genetic material and hamper its ability to replicated on surfaces.
There is no evidence UV rays can kill the coronavirus in the body.
On the back of the claims, Trump proposed two dangerous ideas, which included injecting cleaning agents in the body and the use of UV light at a White House briefing.
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