No One Really Knows

With Coronavirus now affecting every continent, except for Antarctica, there is hope that the virus will act like influenza as the weather warms up, however the World Health Organization’s emergency chief, Dr. Michael Ryan says the virus will “likely continue to spread in warmer weather and people shouldn’t assume that it will disappear in the Summer like the flu.”

Ryan says after COVID-19 is around for a few years and the population has had it, the virus could calm down and be more flu-like, but the immunity hasn’t been built up yet.

Other related viruses such as SARS and MERS were contained by banning travel from hotspots like Asia and Canada as well as the reduction of palm civets which spread the diseases to humans.

From The Associated Press:

Benjamin Cowling, head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Division at the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University, said he suspects wider outbreaks exist in countries that already have confirmed cases, such as Thailand and Vietnam. “Most of the typically hot countries, we think, have not been testing as aggressively as some of the colder ones have been,” he said.

Cowling also said that how people behave in winter environments is likely having an effect.

“People are more likely to spend time indoors in colder weather than they are in the summer,” he said. “More time indoors means that people are more likely to be in the same rooms together and thus get infected.”

“I don’t think we can count on it stopping in the summer. It may slow down, but it won’t be stopped,” he said. “At this rate, we would expect every country in the world to have cases in about nine months — we’re headed towards that now. ”

Susan Saunders 3/12/20