Recent article from BBC covering some of our recent ongoing work about COVID-19 and climate.
An excerpt:
“Climate comes into play because it affects the stability of the virus outside the human body when expelled by coughing or sneezing, for example,” says Miguel Araújo, who studies the effects of environmental change on biodiversity at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. “The greater the time the virus remains stable in the environment, the greater its capacity to infect other people and become epidemic. While Sars-Cov-2 has quickly spread all over the world, the major outbreaks have mainly occurred in places exposed to cool and dry weather.”
His computer models certainly seem to match the pattern of outbreaks around the world, with the highest number of cases outside of the tropics.
Araújo believes that if Covid-19 shares a similar sensitivity to temperature and humidity, it could mean cases of coronavirus will flare up at different times around the world.
“It is reasonable to expect the two viruses will share similar behaviour,” he says. “But this is not a one-variable equation. The virus spreads from human to human. The more humans at any given place and the more they get into contact with each other, the more infections there will be. Their behaviour is key to understanding the propagation of the virus.”
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