Since the beginning of the pandemic, speculation has emerged about whether or not the freezing temperatures or hot ones can kill the novel coronavirus.
While it’s known that high temperatures can kill human coronaviruses, Healthline reported various factors can make the precise temperature and time it takes to kill a virus differ.
Recently, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have looked into the matter and provided some clarity on how the hot and cold play a role in COVID-19 infection.
Research published late last month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health saw scientists, who defined weather as “equivalent air temperature,” examine how this value lined up with coronavirus' spread in different places from March to July 2020. Their scale spanned U.S. states and counties, countries, regions and the entire globe.
Using cellphone data to analyze travel behaviors, researchers also studied the relationship between coronavirus infection and human behavior at the county and state levels.
Human behaviors in a general sense were reviewed and during the study, scientists didn’t try to form a link between how the weather may affect it. Researchers also adjusted their analyses at each scale so population differences didn’t distort the outcomes.
Results showed that temperature and humidity do not play a meaningful role in spreading the novel coronavirus. That means COVID-19′s transmission from one person to another depends virtually entirely on human behavior, regardless of whether it’s hot or cold outside.
The reason? Weather affects the environment that the coronavirus must survive in before infecting a new host. However, it affects human behavior, too. It’s human behavior that moves the virus from one host to another.
“The effect of weather is low and other features such as mobility have more impact than weather,” lead researcher Dev Niyogi, a professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering said in a statement. “In terms of relative importance, weather is one of the last parameters.”
However, data showed the obvious influence of human behavior and the huge impact of individual behaviors. Among the main contributing factors to the spread of COVID-19 were taking trips and spending time away from home, which had a relative importance of about 34% and 26% respectively. Population and urban density followed with a relative importance of about 23% and 13% respectively.
“We shouldn’t think of the problem as something driven by weather and climate,” said co-author Sajad Jamshidi, a research assistant at Purdue University, in a press release. “We should take personal precautions, be aware of the factors in urban exposure.”
Find out more information on the study by reading the press release here.
