They have already proved that the "low viral spread during summer" is not accurate.
That's not what NPR's quoted experts are saying. They believe there is definitely a lower viral spread now and believe it will get worse when the weather cools.
The seasonal effect
It gets worse. On Thursday, Chris Murray, the head of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasting team, pointed to growing evidence that the coronavirus will spread more easily as the weather turns cold.
Murray's team analyzed the pattern of the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. to date. They found that the drop in the reproduction number since early spring can't be entirely explained by obvious contributing factors — such as people's reduced mobility or mask wearing or better testing. And when the team looked for additional variables that could explain the change, it found a strong correlation with warming weather.
This finding doesn't shed light on
why transmission may be reduced in the warmer months. (For example, could it be that coronavirus droplets don't hang in warmer air for as long? Is it simply that people spend less time mingling with each other indoors?) But Murray says that "as time goes by, the evidence is accumulating that it is a very strong predictor of transmission."
The effect is not strong enough to make the virus completely disappear over the summer. But it does mean, Murray says, that come autumn transmission will likely pick up.
"We start to see a powerful increase that will be driven by seasonality starting in early September and these numbers will intensify through till February," Murray says. "So seasonality will be a very big driver of the second wave."
The nation still sees more than 20,000 new cases on average a day, a number that's barely budged for weeks. Forecasters say we're looking at tens of thousands more deaths this summer.
www.npr.org
