Warmer weather by itself won’t curtail the spread of covid: expert panel

Transmission dynamics, and the timing of virus surges, have been driven more by changes in human behavior, demographics, and lately, more transmissible variants than by changes in the weather, a country’s climate, or air quality, according to an initial report by a WMO task team report released Thursday.

“At this stage, evidence does not support the use of meteorological and air quality factors as a basis for governments to relax their interventions aimed at reducing transmission,” Ben Zaitchik, a co-chair of the task team who is an Earth scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “We saw waves of infection rise in warm seasons and warm regions in the first year of the pandemic, and there is no evidence that this couldn’t happen again in the coming year.”

The 16 interdisciplinary experts brought together under the auspices of the WMO, which is a United…