Warm temperatures slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus — but don’t completely eradicate it, according to new studies.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 90 percent of COVID-19 transmissions that occurred until Sunday happened in regions with low temperatures — between 37.4 and 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Coronavirus cases have been reported in countries with equatorial climates and those in the Southern Hemisphere —which are now in summer.
But regions with average temperatures above 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit currently account for fewer than 6 percent of global cases.
“Wherever the temperatures were colder, the number of the cases started increasing quickly,” Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at the university who co-authored the study, told the New York Times. “You see this in Europe, even though the health care there is among the world’s best.”
That pattern applies in the US too, Bukhari told the paper.
The outbreak has developed more slowly in Southern states like Arizona, Florida and Texas compared to New York, Washington state and Colorado, for example, according to Bukhari.
In California, the rate is somewhere in the middle.
Epidemiologists have seen a similar pattern with other viruses — including the flu, which generally follows a November-to-April trend in the Northern Hemisphere, Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, said during a recent briefing, according to the Times.
The four types of coronavirus that cause the common cold also pick up in the winter and drop off in the summer.