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Will warmer weather weaken coronavirus?

| March 16, 2020 8:56 AM

As we get closer to spring across North Idaho and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, the full impact of warmer temperatures to the coronavirus, also known as the COVID-19 virus, is still uncertain. Scientists are using research with other similar diseases to get a good idea on the spread and life of this new virus.

Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. A pandemic is an epidemic of a disease that has spread across a large region, multiple continents or worldwide. Experts are hoping that the virus will start tapering off in the spring as the weather warms up in the Northern Hemisphere.

Cold and flu season usually peaks in the colder months and then cases often drop off in the spring. It’s believed that people stay indoors during the colder months and are in close quarters with one another, which increases the transmission of colds and flus.

However, there is evidence that in an environment of a warming climate and weather extremes, the chances for an influenza epidemic go up. According to a paper published in late January in IOPscience, it was once believed that warmer-than-normal winters can reduce influenza epidemics. But, during the winter of 2017-18, there was an outbreak of a deadly influenza in many countries across the mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, which was one of the warmest winters in decades.

Research also showed that when there was “strong rapid variability” of the weather during the autumn season, it often led to “deadly influenza epidemic in the subsequent months in highly-populated northern mid-latitudes.”

According to another article in webmd.com, other studies suggested that climate change may have at least been partially responsible for the Zika virus spread. In 2015, the Zika virus migrated out of a small group of islands in the Pacific and moved through the Americas. Approximately 500,000 people in 40 countries were infected that led to brain and nervous system damage to some unborn babies.

During the outbreak in 2015, we had a very strong El Nino, the warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperature event in the waters of the south-central Pacific Ocean. The El Nino event, combined with other factors, led to the warmest temperature in our planet’s recorded history. The article also states that other diseases closely related to Zika were far worse during El Nino years as it “spread farther, faster and infected more people than years when the average temperatures were cooler.”

A report issued by the World Health Organization a short time ago stated that in 2019, global air temperatures were the second highest in recorded history dating back to the mid 1800s. Ocean temperatures were the warmest and last year there were more weather extremes of drought, floods, heat and cold seen across the globe. There were also record concentrations of human-caused greenhouse gases.

It’s very difficult to say whether the coronavirus will act like influenza and subside in the northern latitudes as we head toward the summer months. Most of the recent cases have been in the cooler Northern Hemispheric regions, but there have been over 650 reports of infections in normally warm and humid regions of Singapore and Malaysia as of late last week. Australia, which is currently at the end of its astronomical summer season, has around 300 confirmed cases.

In an article from CNN, a public health expert says, “There really still is so much unknown about this virus. If case numbers decrease over the summer, it is a good idea to prepare for a resurgence during the colder months.” Regardless, we’ll just have to wait and see how this virus behaves and also, please be safe.

In terms of our local weather, we finally got some snow late last week. Until the storm arrived last Friday, only 0.2 inches of snow had fallen in Coeur d’Alene this month, which is one of the lowest early March totals in recorded history.

Conditions will be turning warmer this week, but it will be dry. Cliff and I believe that we’ll have a chance of more snow at the end of the month. However, it’s during the warmer and wetter new moon cycle, so we’ll likely see some rain as well. Then, the full moon cycle in early April will bring our region another chance of light snow. After that, we believe that our snowfall season will come to an end with seasonal totals near or a little below the 69.8-inch mark.

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Contact Randy Mann at randy@longrangeweather.com