… Or by not wearing a coat when it’s cold out? Don’t you catch a cold by catching a bug? Does the bug infiltrate your body easier when you don’t have as many protective layers on?
Colds are caused by infectious viruses transmitted from person to person via respiratory droplets (basically snot) in coughs and boogers and used KleenexR. That’s it. Temperature has little to do with it. People who live where the temperature never drops below 22C get colds just like people in Spitzbergen. The association between colds and cold weather probably is because people tend to crowd together indoors during cold whether where they cough on each other and smear their snot around.
You don’t catch a cold just by being cold.
Sometimes the old wives were wise. This time they were just plain wrong.
This fits in with my mother’s warnings about going outside with wet hair (you’ll get pneumonia), going outside without a hat and letting the cold air blow in your ears (you’ll get an ear infection) and sleeping with wet hair (you’ll get croup and/or pneumonia).
As Smeghead said, somtimes they’re just plain wrong.