In 10 seconds? Although climatic conditions are not dominant factors in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers believe it will become a winter disease in the coming years.
How does the weather affect COVID-19? Laboratory studies seemingly provide a simple answer. Higher temperatures, more sunlight, and to an extent, higher humidity make the SARS-CoV-2 virus decay faster in the aerosols it uses to spread. Accordingly, in the early months of the pandemic, researchers predicted that COVID-19 cases would drop much like the flu in summer. However, other scientists contradicted this hypothesis, for example, researchers at Columbia University found that only 17.5% in the variation of the important “R” number (describing the expected number of infections caused by 1 person) was attributable to meteorological factors. In other words, we could not rely on the weather alone to make the novel coronavirus disappear.