Whether it’s hot or cold, the weather alone doesn’t have a significant impact on the spread of COVID-19.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, there was great hope that hot summer temperatures could reduce its spread. Although summer did not provide widespread relief, the relationship between weather and COVID-19 remains a hot topic.

The relationship between weather and COVID-19 is complex. The weather affects the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before it infects a new host.But it also has an impact Human behavior, Move the virus from one host to another.

A study led by the University of Texas at Austin has somewhat clarified the role of weather in COVID-19 infection, and a new study reveals that temperature and humidity do not play a key role in the spread of coronavirus.

That is, the transmission of COVID-19 from one person to another, whether hot or cold outside, is almost entirely dependent on human behavior.

“Weather has less impact, and other features such as mobility have more impact than weather,” said UT Austin’s Jackson Geological Sciences Department and Professor Dev Niyogi of Cockrell Institute of Technology, who led the study. “Weather is one of the last parameters in terms of relative importance.”

The study was published on October 26th International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health..

The co-authors are Sajad Jamshidi, a research assistant at Purdue University, and Maryam Baniasad, a PhD candidate at Ohio State University.

In this study, the weather was defined as “equivalent temperature”. It combines temperature and humidity into a single value. Scientists analyze how this coronavirus-tracked value spread from March to July 2020 across US states and counties, countries, regions, and throughout the world. Did.

On a county and state scale, researchers also used cell phone data to study travel habits and investigated the relationship between coronavirus infection and human behavior.

This study investigated human behavior in a general sense and did not attempt to link it to how the weather affected it. At each scale, researchers adjusted the analysis so that population differences did not distort the results.

Beyond scale, scientists have found that the weather has little effect. When compared to other factors using statistical indicators that analyze the relative contribution of each factor to a particular outcome, the relative importance of weather on a county scale is less than 3%, of a particular type. There was no indication that the weather promoted the spread. On top of another.

In contrast, the data showed a clear impact on human behavior and a significant impact on individual behavior. Going on a trip and staying away from home are the top two factors contributing to the growth of COVID-19, with relative importance of about 34% and 26%, respectively.The following two Important factors Population and urban density, of relative importance were about 23% and 13%, respectively.

“We shouldn’t think of this problem as being caused by weather or climate,” Jamshidi said. “We need to take personal precautions and be aware of the factors that expose us to the city.”

Biochemist and pharmacist Baniasad said assumptions about how the coronavirus responds to the weather are largely known by laboratory studies of related viruses. She said the study demonstrates the importance of a study that analyzes how the coronavirus spreads throughout the human community.

“When you study something in the lab, it’s a monitored environment. It’s hard to scale up to society,” she said. “This was our first motivation to do more extensive research.”

Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia who did not participate in the study, said the study provides important insights into weather and coronaviruses of varying sizes.

“This important study reveals some of the implications for the relationship between weather and COVID-19 and highlights the need to tackle scientific challenges on an appropriate scale,” Shepherd said.

One of the key lessons of the coronavirus pandemic, Niyogi said, is the importance of analyzing phenomena on the “human scale,” the scale on which humans live their daily lives. He said the study was an example of this kind of perspective.

“It is claimed that COVID can change everything,” Niyogi said. “We have seen weather Climate outlook is a outlook as a system that allows us to shrink, shrink, shrink and see how it affects humans. Now we’re flipping the case over, starting with a human exposure scale and expanding outwards. This is a new paradigm needed to study virus exposure and human environmental modeling systems, including new sensing and technologies like AI. ”