News outlets, such as CNN, recently posted President Trump’s tweet praising Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “strong, sharp and powerfully focused” efforts to contain the deadly coronavirus. Trump added that he thinks Xi will be successful “especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.”
But experts warn that it is far too early to make that assumption.
“It would be reckless to assume that things will quiet down in spring and summer,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. “We don’t really understand the basis of seasonality, and of course we know absolutely nothing about this particular virus.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, referring to Trump’s tweet, said: “His hope is our hope. But we don’t have knowledge that it will do that.”
Schaffner further explained to CNN that the coronavirus is a respiratory virus and these viruses tend to be seasonal — but that’s not always the case.
“One would hope that the gradual spring will help the virus recede. We can’t be sure of that,” Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, added.
According to MSN, viruses that cause influenza or milder coronavirus colds do tend to subside in warm weather because they are seasonal, say scientists, so the president’s comments may have some scientific backing.
“I hope it will show seasonality, but it’s hard to know,” says Stuart Weston, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where the virus is being studied.
The flu season generally lasts from October to April or March and scientists say this could be because during the winter people cluster indoors where human-to-human transmission becomes more likely. Other studies have shown that high temperature and high humidity slowed the influenza spread, and at very high humidity levels, the virus stopped completly, according to MSN.
Scientists speculate that in humid conditions, the small droplets from a sneeze or cough become heavier as they gather more moisture when expelled and eventually fall to the ground. Low humidity, on the other hand, may impair the function of mucus in your nose, which your body depends upon to trap and expel foreign bodies like viruses and bacteria.
Some experts like epidemiologist Marc Lipstitch of Harvard don’t believe that weather changes will make a dent in the spread of the new virus. And David Heymann from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that we simply do not know enough about this virus to make any predictions.
“The risk of making predictions without an evidence base is that they could, if proven wrong, be taken as verity and give a false sense of security,” he tells MSN.
Additionally, some scientists say the lack of natural immunity in the general population factors in. So does the fact that the virus is now on all continents save Antarctica, and has affected nations like Australia and Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere, where it's currently warm.