Fluctuations in the covid-19 numbers could have a lot to do with the weather: Obviously, that echoes Trump’s famous speculation that the virus would “just disappear” over the summer. Just as obviously, it didn’t. But Trump’s theory may not have been wrong so much as insufficiently refined. After all, it was based on a real observation: back in March, colder places were having more outbreaks than warmer ones. In the United States, however, that relationship broke down this summer.But don’t focus on the temperature; focus on how humans react to it.
What A Summer Of COVID-19 Taught Scientists About Indoor vs. Outdoor Transmission: Making predictions about what will happen in the winter based on what has happened so far is simultaneously simple and difficult, experts told me. It’s simple, in that we already know what we need to know to tell that this virus isn’t just going to magically disappear. “I think winter will be bad, because things are already bad,” said Colin Carlson, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. From the beginning of the pandemic through Oct. 17, some 217,000 Americans died of COVID-19 and almost 8 million others tested positive for the virus. There’s no reason to assume that the shifting of the seasons is going to reduce the number of overall cases — so fall and winter are likely to go on being bad.
But understanding how seasons can change the pandemic is genuinely difficult. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, while we know that changes in weather have an impact on this virus, there’s a lot of nuance around those effects.
