Will the coronavirus diminish in the summer just to make a comeback when things get colder?
For months now, scientists and politicians have chimed in on whether or not the coronavirus would diminish, if not disappear entirely, over summer. As the weather heats up in the Northern Hemisphere, and cools down in the South, what will happen to the pandemic? Bloomberg talked to one of America’s most respected public health experts for his opinion.
Since graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1972, Harvey Fineberg has devoted most of his academic career to health policy and medical decision-making. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee that Harvey chairs reviewed in April research on the virus’s ability to persist under different climatic conditions. The findings were submitted in a report that went to the White House.
Harvey says, “Many respiratory viruses just by experience have a seasonality component when the weather is drier, cooler more people indoors, they do a better job of transmitting from one person to another. So the incidence of infection tends to go up in the winter months when you’re far from the equator.”
Harvey points out that it’s too early to know for sure when it comes to the coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2. More is known about two other coronaviruses: SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, and MERS, or Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome.
“MERS has experienced very little seasonality. It tends to be in warm climates. The SARS original outbreak occurred in areas near the equator, like Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as in temperate climates such as Toronto and North America.”
In a laboratory setting, the coronavirus tends not to survive as long in warm, humid conditions. It does better in cooler, drier temperatures. So, there’s some basis for thinking Covid-19 may rebound when the weather gets cooler.
Harvey says, ” When people are indoors, they’re probably touching the same surfaces even more regularly and more often. So the net of this is we can’t be sure what’s going to happen. We have seen outbreaks and even increases in areas like Singapore where they’re on the equator virtually. But it is, I think, reasonable to expect that there’s going to be some seasonal fluctuation to this coronavirus like many respiratory viruses.”
And that may not be a good thing. If cases do drop over summer, there’s a risk of a false sense of security setting in, which could set control efforts back when the seasons change again.
Harvey says, “If the summer months create conditions where the virus can continue to spread at a very low rate, in effect to stay below the radar, but to seed many more geographic areas even that are affected today, that’s not a good recipe because that could mean in the fall and winter months we’re going to see escalations in many different places happening at the same time. So we have to maintain our vigilance certainly through the summer with this new and dangerous virus.”
Harvey says, in the U.S. at least, a scale up of diagnostic capability will be key.
“With luck, we’ll be in a much stronger position by the fall than we were this spring to have adequate testing as a part of the response. And without testing, without a unified structure, without the capacity to do the contact tracing and follow up, there really was no way that this virus could be absolutely defeated.”
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