Coronavirus May Wane This Summer, but Don’t Expect the Pandemic to End

By Ellen Wright Clayton
Will SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, fade away on its own this summer?
After all, other viruses – including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes bronchiolitis in little children – are mostly seen in the winter.
The National Academies' Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats recently addressed the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 will follow the same pattern. The group of experts corralled the research that's been done so far – much of it not yet peer-reviewed – to assess the evidence.
While there is some reason to hope that things may get better as the weather warms up, there is plenty of reason for the U.S. to keep its guard up.
Are Heat and Humidity Reason for Hope?
Although the U.S. is early in the course of the pandemic, there is evidence from other countries that SARS-CoV-2 spreads more rapidly in cold, dry weather.
One preprint study of 30 Chinese provinces showed that the number of COVID-19 cases went down by between 36% and 57% for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. When temperatures held steady in the low 40s F, the number of cases went down between 11% and 22% with each 1% increase in relative humidity (how much water is in the air).
A larger preprint study looking at 310 regions in 116 countries found that 11% more cases were reported when the temperature went down 9 degrees, the relative humidity went down 10% and when the wind speed went up.
Laboratory research also suggest that the virus survives longer in cold conditions. One study showed that SARS-CoV-2 lasts for 14 days at 40 F in lab media but is gone after one day at 98.6 F.
These and other studies suggest that warm, humid weather may slow the spread of this virus, although not all commentators agree.
New research on this topic appears almost daily, and scientists are watching to see what happens as summer comes to the Northern Hemisphere.
Which Clues Call for Caution?
COVID-19 is already spreading in many parts of the world where it's hot, including Australia and South America, demonstrating that high temperatures are not enough to stop the disease.
The most important reason to be concerned about ongoing spread is the fact that this is a brand new virus for humans, so almost everyone is susceptible to being infected.
In fact, weather actually appears to play a minor role in the rate at which this virus spreads.
Other influences on infection rates include individual behaviors, cultural practices, geography, income and living conditions. Public health practices such as social distancing, the intensity of testing for infection, contact tracing, quarantine of people who are exposed and isolation of people who are actually infected also play a big role in how the coronavirus spreads.
The news from other viral diseases is not encouraging either. The two most serious coronavirus diseases that are closely related to COVID-19, the first SARS outbreak and MERS, did not vary with the seasons after they emerged. In fact, MERS is still found year-round in the Middle East, where it is hot and dry. Pandemic influenza infections have emerged at different times of the year as well.
What Should We Do?
The long-term solution to SARS-CoV-2 will be to develop a safe and effective vaccine. This work is proceeding at unprecedented speed, but it will still take anywhere from months to a few years and will require trials involving thousands of people and massive international leadership and collaboration.
Until there's a vaccine, prevention will require avoiding exposure to people who can spread the virus. Communities need to test people to find out who is contagious and engage in serious contact tracing, quarantine and isolation. Scientists need to learn more about how to determine if someone is immune and how long immunity lasts, a big open question at the moment. As individuals, each of us will need to follow expert scientific advice about good hygiene practices and distancing.
SARS-CoV-2 is likely to keep circulating until the human population has widespread immunity, which hopefully will come not from an unchecked pandemic but from developing and deploying a safe and effective vaccine.
Ellen Wright Clayton is a Professor of Pediatrics and Law and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Disclosure statement: Ellen Wright Clayton reviewed the statement on seasonality by the NASEM Standing Committee.
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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