No one claimed warm weather will stop it, but it might mitigate it. For instance, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and to a lesser degree, the Philippines and Thailand all have had a huge influx of Chinese tourists, but have relatively small numbers of infections.
It will be interesting to see if places like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, which are going into Winter will see increases.
Yes but again the link in the OP is about a very high death rate, compared to the rest of the country, in a very hot and muggy city.
FTR, and not that it matters much, but I agree with this warning. Ignorance of the law (or the non-political nature of this forum) is no excuse.
IIRC the cold weather ==> more flu; warm weather ==> less flu model sees more secondary (bacterial) infections in colder seasons. Do models show influenzas spreading as a function of ambient temperature and humidity? If not, why foster the fantasy?
The incomparable Kenneth Copeland:
Also: BAAAUURN THIS THING
Still going strong here. Almost 5,000 cases and 144 deaths. The weather here is basically like June in New York. The rate of increase is finally going down, but that’s due to a stringent lockdown rather than weather.
Didn’t we already know heat wasn’t going to do anything? Cases were popping up in Australia and South America in January and February, no? Can’t remember.
Most of us, yeah, but not all of us. Warm weather won’t stop it, and it is not a hoax.
I can’t believe how many people fell for this shit. The reason the flu or other viruses seem to go away in warm weather is because in Fall and Winter we tend to stay indoors more, increasing the likelihood of infection. By the time the latest virus burns its way through the population, it starts to get warmer and people go outdoors more and it goes dormant.
This virus arrived at our shores very late in the winter, so that ain’t happening.
Does Ecuador even have seasons, to speak of? The whole country sits right on the equator – that’s why it’s called Ecuador. It ranges from about 1°N to about 5°S. I would think the seasonal temperature is fairly uniform, and warm (depending on the altitude) all year round. Quito is very nearly on the equator. Guayaquil is about 2°S.
Influenza’s in vitro survivability has been shown to be a function of humidity and temperature, as has its in vivo transmissibility in a controlled environment. This is not at all surprising for a virus spread by aerosol. And it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis to expect a similar behavior for a virus that is thought to spread in a similar manner.
Furthermore, the nonzero presence and transmission of the virus in warm areas does not disprove this hypothesis. People do get influenza in the summer. Just less frequently.
We never got to an epidemic in Australia. Sickness here was driven by imported cases, and isolation kept the reproduction rate down below 1.0 – down below 0.05 for the best documented series.
Since there is no endemic reservoir, the only way we can see an increase is by relaxing travel restrictions, or by individual acts of monumental stupidity. Neither of which is really weather-related.
Influenza season in the tropics is rainy season. Rainy season in Ecuador is Christmas. Ecuador is just coming out of rainy season. I don’t know how strong the correlation is, or how it matches the months. I think that Flu season in the USA is December, not February?
““If, for example, we look at the epidemic in Australia – where it is still their summer, moving towards their autumn – there are a lot of cases and they’re having an acceleration of an epidemic there,” says Jimmy Whitworth at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.”
I don’t know Jimmy Whitworth from Adam, but he must have been accepting at face value the same kind of numbers that were quoted everywhere in Australia showing an ‘acceleration of the epidemic’. The numbers dominated by already-infected people coming into Australia from Italy and the USA.
I don’t understand what the president wanted us to take away from the debriefing yesterday. I thought it was already known that the transmission of the virus at high temperature, sunlight, and humidity conditions is lower than what you find under wintertime conditions.
Seeing as how the majority of Americans spend most of their time in the air-conditioned indoors during the summer, I don’t know how much comfort we’re supposed to take from this particular “revelation.” And lower transmission rates doesn’t equate to insignificant transmission rates. Great, our chances of getting the rona from the metal sliding board at the local playground is super low! But that doesn’t mean there’s a low probability of getting infected at, say, a crowded beach or while hanging out with neighbors at a backyard BBQ.
Just thinking about my own experiences, I have had some god-awful colds in the summer months. I’ve only had the flu once in my life and it happened in the summer. While I was living in Hotlanta.
Isn’t it in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and in several sub-Saharan countries? Maybe it doesn’t survive as well on surfaces in the heat and maybe more sunlight hours helps, but I don’t think there’s much to hope for it disappearing with the seasons.
Isn’t this something I literally just addressed?
In most of the tropics, there’s more variation between day and night temperatures than between seasons. In tropical lowlands, seasonal variation amounts to a few degrees between the warmest and coldest months. As has been said, seasons are based on rainfall rather than temperature.
Here in Panama, we are just transitioning from the four-month dry season (verano=“summer”) to the rainy season (invierno=“winter”). I have never heard of a seasonal correlation for influenza cases. I would think any correlation would be screwed up by cases brought in by tourists during the northern winter, which is of course our high season.
That’s not necessarily meaningful.
a) Warm weather slows not stops transmission, among seasonal diseases.
b) People have weakened defenses against the disease, since it’s so foreign to us, perhaps making it able to transfer even under poor conditions for transfer.
Indications would be that the seasonality of the disease is non-existent. But that could just be that it’s sufficiently infectious to us that it doesn’t matter too much at the moment. Once we have greater immunity, perhaps, it could start to show more seasonality.
Or not.
It’s something that reality decides, not us.