No Summer Vacation

A prestigious group of scientists say the pandemic won’t wane in warmer weather

Many held out hope that the Covid-19 pandemic, like the seasonal flu, would fade away when the weather warmed up. Early speculation, some based on data on other coronaviruses, hinted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would follow the same patterns. As the number of cases worldwide surpassed 1.5 million, summer seemed like it couldn’t come soon enough.

But a new public report, sent to the White House by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Wednesday, puts those fantasies to rest, saying there’s no evidence to support the claim that the pandemic will disappear with warmer weather.

That isn’t to say there isn’t any work being done on this topic. Rather, it’s that the existing studies show conflicting results and are plagued with data and methodology issues, so scientists can’t draw any useful conclusions from them. The National Academies committee who wrote the report based their findings on the scant research available, dividing it in two categories: lab studies and natural history studies.

In the former, scientists grow virus particles in a laboratory and stick them on a variety of surfaces at different temperatures and humidities to see how long they survive. Of the four lab studies the committee highlighted, only one is actually published, and the rest are ongoing. The preliminary results are mixed: One study suggests higher temperatures do kill the…