Summer Heat May Not Diminish Coronavirus Strength

Amid speculations that the novel coronavirus will start disappearing due to the hot weather brought by summer time, like some viruses do, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine told the public to essentially not get their hopes up. This is explained in a report which it gave to the White House.

A panel from the organization concluded this after having reviewed various research reports that say there is no basis for the summer weather to suppress the virus' spread. No evidence exists that the humidity and the sun offers benefits.

The report was sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Kelvin Droegemeier, who is also the National Science Foundation's acting director. It was a nine-page "rapid expert consultation" brief.

Scripps Research Translational Institute in California immunologist Kristian Andersen, who is also part of the National Academies Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases & 21st Century Health Threats, said that the current data shows that the virus will not likely diminish due to summer. She also said that policy makers must be careful not to base their strategies and policies around this belief. She adds that should a reduction occur, it is more plausible to attribute it to other measures that have been implemented.

David Relman, a researcher on host-microbe interactions in Stanford University, said that human behavior will be more critical than temperature and humidity.

The National Academies is a pool of independent agencies advising the public and the government. Its latest report cited well-controlled studies showing how high humidity and temperature diminishes the coronavirus' capacity to survive outside a host. However, the report also noted the limitations of these studies; they consider the findings less conclusive.

The report also noted how some reports discussed how growth rates of the pandemic peak in colder temperatures, but the studies were limited and short. A study conducted by M.I.T. scientists had a preliminary finding that there were fewer Covid-19 cases in warmer climates. However, it did not give any definite conclusion. Study co-author and MIT computational scientist Qasim Bukhari says that the real chance of stopping the virus is through quarantine measures.

The report also cautioned that in other countries that currently experience summer, such as Iran and Australia, the COVID-19 virus still spreads rapidly. In light of this fact, the theory that high humidity and temperature decreases case loses credence.

Pandemics behave differently from seasonal outbreaks. The report looked into the history of past flu pandemics, and found that out of the 10 influenza pandemics during the last 250 or so years, two began during Northern Hemisphere winter; three during spring; two during summer; and three during autumn. In addition, all of them had a second wave peak which occurred roughly six months after their first emergence in humans, regardless of the time of the initial outbreak.

Last March 16, President Trump said that the coronavirus may "wash" through during the hotter weather. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious diseases expert in the U.S., expressed various opinions about summer's effect on the coronavirus. During his live interview last Wednesday with The Journal of the American Medical Association editor-in-chief Dr. Howard Bauchner, Fauci said the virus will "almost certainly" go down a bit by fall. However, a conversation with Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry last March 26 found Fauci saying that even though it was reasonable to assume that the summer will diminish the virus' spread, one "should not" count on it.