Covid and Temperature

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Anchor lead: What do fall temperatures portend for Covid-19? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Cooler temperatures during the spring of 2020 were associated with faster transmission of Sars-CoV2, a study by Adam Kaplin, a researcher and psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown. Kaplin describes the findings.

Kaplin: What we showed was that as the temperature was increasing going from January to April in these fifty countries in the Northern hemisphere our data says the higher the temperature the slower the increase in transmission,  early on when its still kind of linear, and before you have social interventions. But once you begin to take off, you get the social variables involved and then it’s no longer looking at just the temperature.  :32

Kaplin says interventions such as physical distancing, closure of schools and indoor gathering spaces, and wearing of masks then overcame the impact of temperature in transmission. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.