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Pedestrians walk past a sign displaying the coronavirus as a bomb to warn against the new coronavirus covid-19 at Seoul City Hall on December 8, 2020 (Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP).
GENEVA, Switzerland – COVID-19 appears likely to become a seasonal illness, the United Nations said on Thursday, warning against easing pandemic-related measures simply based on weather factors.
More than a year after the new coronavirus first appeared in China, a number of mysteries still surround the spread of the disease that has killed nearly 2.7 million people worldwide.
In their first report, a team of experts tasked with trying to shed light on one of those mysteries by examining possible weather and air quality influences on the spread of COVID-19, found some indication that the disease would develop into a seasonal threat.
The 16-member team created by the UN World Meteorological Organization noted that respiratory viral infections are often seasonal, “in particular, the fall-winter peak for influenza and cold-causing coronaviruses in temperate climates.”
“This has fueled expectations that, if it persists for many years, COVID-19 will prove to be a strongly seasonal disease,” he said in a statement.
Modeling studies anticipate that transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, “may become seasonal over time.”
Trigger?
But the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 so far appears to have been influenced primarily by government interventions such as mask mandates and travel restrictions, they said, rather than weather.
Therefore, the task force insisted that meteorological and climatic conditions alone should not for now be the trigger to loosen anti-COVID restrictions.
“At this stage, the evidence does not support the use of weather and air quality factors as the basis for governments to relax their interventions aimed at reducing transmission,” said task force co-chair Ben Zaitchik of the department of science. Terrestrial and Planetary by The John. Hopkins University in the United States.
He noted that during the first year of the pandemic, infections in some places increased in warm seasons, “and there is no evidence that this cannot happen again in the next year.”
The experts, who focused only on outdoor weather and air quality conditions in the report, said laboratory studies had provided some evidence that the virus survives longer in cold, dry climates and when there are little ultraviolet radiation.
But it was not clear whether weather influences “have a significant influence on transmission rates under real-world conditions.”
They also noted that the evidence on the impact of air quality on the virus remained “inconclusive.”
There was some preliminary evidence that poor air quality increases death rates from Covid-19, “but not that pollution directly impacts airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”
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