The issue of COVID-19’s seasonality has been covered extensively on Lockdown Sceptics. Back in February, Glen Bishop noted that a model developed by Imperial College researchers – which predicted there would be an additional 130,000 deaths this summer – assumed that transmission does not vary by season.
In a follow-up article, I reviewed eight separate studies that found evidence for the seasonality of COVID-19. Indeed, it would be rather surprising if COVID-19 wasn’t seasonal given what we know about other human coronaviruses, i.e., that they are – in the words of one recent study – “sharply seasonal”.
However, doubts have been expressed about whether COVID-19 is in fact a seasonal disease. Such doubts are based on the observation that countries like Chile and South Africa saw epidemics burgeon during their summer months, and that Britain itself is now seeing a rise in cases.
But as the biologist Francois Balloux notes in a recent Twitter thread, the fact that some countries have seen infections rise during the summer is not inconsistent with seasonal factors playing a role in transmission. It just means they aren’t the only factors involved. (One also has to consider viral evolution, population immunity and human behaviour.)
A new study by researchers from Yale and Columbia (which was published in the journal Nature Communications) offers particularly strong evidence for the seasonality of COVID-19. The authors looked at the relationship between seasonal factors and the R number across US counties between March and December of last year.
They ran a statistical model of the R number, with temperature, specific humidity and UV radiation as predictors. The model controlled for a range of other factors, including spatial, demographic and socio-economic variables.
The authors found that each of the three seasonal factors was independently associated with R. They then calculated the fraction of R that was attributable to seasonality, and obtained a value of 17.5%. Interestingly, specific humidity was the most important of the three, contributing 9.4%.
The authors’ findings indicate that “that cold and dry weather and low levels of UV radiation are moderately associated with increased SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility”. However, they were unable to examine possible differences in seasonality across different variants, leaving this as a topic for future research.
Overall, their study provides some of the best evidence yet for seasonality. And it gives one more reason to be sceptical that the current rise in cases here in Britain portends a major epidemic.
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Off t yet very much on t
https://youtu.be/r5NiOU6LkNo?si=rjorfJuKz6YPbpxa
Thanks Dinger.
I’m Irish and English ! Officially
The irish are rising up, so should the British!
I keep thinking having lived through the 1970,s ! Where is the IRA & other paramilitary groups who stopped at nothing to take back Ireland as they saw it ! The EU has done more recent damage than England has.
It isn’t the ‘bloody English’ and it’s not historical.
The Irish are getting what they deserve. They had voted to leave the EU in a referendum twice, only to change their minds when the issues were reframed. The EU then claimed they had listened to Irish concerns on abortion, military neutrality and sovereignty etc and basically scared voters into accepting the EU in a second referendum. I think the Irish can now see as their country is flooded with migrants that they were right the first time and are now regretting it.
Degrees will become increasingly worthless, at least for the wealth creating jobs. For the non productive jobs it looks like it’s a growth business, but much like when we shut down the economy to save the NHS, a growing non productive and parasitic economy will kill itself as the productive individuals are let go and the real value tax revenue dwindles away. Perhaps this is deliberate, especially if those pushing this are Marxists. What a ‘clever’ way to destroy free market capitalism.
They cancelled our voices and allowed this to happen to other colleagues and now their jobs are going to the people they thought were the good guys so zero sympathy from me.
Public universities are lost causes and are not worth saving. Let them rot.
Universities started going to crap when the rivers of gold from foreign students become their focus. I’m in no way blaming the foreign students who are ripped off almost as much as taxpayers. The universities realised they could make money not from providing education, but from selling citizenship. Many of the students were less interested in a quality degree so it no longer mattered. In Australia this is exacerbated by universities focussing on cheap to deliver, popular degrees and failing to train students in key skills needed in the economy. Therefore social sciences degrees are plentiful, but costly degrees like agricultural science, medicine, engineering are few.
AI is the thing now so the system probably sees Degrees as unnecessary!
A similar thing is happening in the NHS.
In 1979 they spent 4% of their budget on admin
in 2006 it was 14%
today it’s 25+%
Money is increasingly spent on bureaucracy instead of front line activity
What is so interesting is that with computerization of so many processes you would think they would have less administrative staff.
Noah Carl did a good enquiry into why woke has spread so widely. It seems that the increase in women going to University, and also the rise of female lecturers, has led to this. I am sorry to say that women’s characteristics lead us to a world like this.
That is why, in the past, women were rarely allowed to hold powerful positions. And, perhaps, controversially, why women were not allowed to be educated too highly. Think about what kind of society we would be living in if only men ran things. I think it would much stronger and safer and our welfare budget would be very small.
The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world, is what you seem to believe.
Women were not allowed to hold powerful positions in Nazi Germany.
Goebbels said: The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.
This fits in nicely with the current orthodoxy that insists that students are to be taught what to think rather than how to think.