LAHORE :As many unfounded claims and myths being circulated on the social media relating to the treatment and protection from Covid-19 are being rejected by the medical experts, another great myth that corona has a connection with weather has been shattered by David Relman, an infectious diseases’ expert at California’s Stanford University.
David Relman says, “We don’t know enough yet about how changes in weather might affect the new coronavirus, dimming hopes that less densely populated and warmer climate cities might escape the worst of the pandemic, and that summer months could see it wane.”
David Relman says scientists cannot be sure if the coronavirus is seasonal because it has not been around long enough to gather enough evidence. "If you look at some of these other viruses and ask what about when they first emerged and entered the human population, what happened then? In the case of new influenza viruses, pandemic influenza viruses, they didn’t really show much seasonality in their first years of living with humans. It took quite some time for them to become seasonal," said Relman, who teaches microbiology and immunology at Stanford.
"These viruses ... are not so mindful of time of year. They care much more about whether there are susceptible humans close enough together for it to jump from one to the next," he says.
"And while it may be that outdoor temperature has some impediment or impeding effect on the ability of the virus to jump from one person to another, I think if you get enough susceptible people close enough, it really won’t matter whether it is hot outside or cold outside, you are still going to get transmission, you know, that exceeds our ability to control it," he added.
Relman says more research into how climate does or does not play a role in the spread of this coronavirus needs to be done. Some experts had hoped that warm weather and the coming summer months in the northern hemisphere would be natural buffers against the coronavirus but Relman says the spread of the virus in New Orleans suggests otherwise.
"While there are tantalising suggestions that perhaps in some cases warmer places have less transmission, it is by no means uniform," he said. "Look at New Orleans. New Orleans has a terrible, explosive outbreak right now and New Orleans is one of the warmest places in the United States right now as well. So, just being warm and humid is not sufficient to, you know, prevent rampant or widespread transmission."
The World Health Organization has said that there is no evidence that temperature would play a role in the coronavirus pandemic but it is an avenue worth exploring. Back in February, US President Donald Trump said the coronavirus could be gone by April as warmer weather arrived.
