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Seasonality will likely only have ‘minor' impact on COVID-19 epidemiology

Jüni P, et al. CMAJ. 2020;doi:10.1503/cmaj.200920.

May 8, 2020

 

Seasonality will likely have only a minor role in the epidemiology of COVID-19 compared with public health interventions such as school closures and social distancing, which have been shown to have a major impact, according to a prospective cohort study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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Jüni and colleagues performed a prospective cohort study of all 144 geopolitical areas throughout the world with at least 10 cases and local transmission as of March 20, 2020, excluding China, South Korea, Iran and Italy.

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“Taken together, these findings suggest that seasonality is likely to play only a minor role in the epidemiology of COVID-19, while public health interventions (school closures, restricting mass gatherings, social distancing) appear to have a major impact,” the authors concluded.

 

https://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/emerging-diseases/news/online/{5875b031-b443-4043-84a5-f6f082407310}/seasonality-will-likely-only-have-minor-impact-on-covid-19-epidemiology

Removed a troll post.

I applaud the OP, TallGuyJohninBKK, for giving the link to the news article, which in turn has the link to the published research report.

 

From the article in cmaj (Canadian Medical Association Journal):

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We performed a prospective cohort study of all 144 geopolitical areas worldwide (375 609 cases) with at least 10 COVID-19 cases and local transmission by Mar. 20, 2020, excluding China, South Korea, Iran and Italy.

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there were few or no associations of epidemic growth with latitude and temperature

 

 

This report by Peter Jüni et al may be a nice statistical exercise with "univariate anylyses" and a "multivariable model", but unless all 144 geopolitical areas included in the study implemented no public health measures, eg school closures, restrictions of mass gatherings, and social distancing, etc, the conclusion that the geopgraphcal location and temperature had little or no effect on the spread of the disease is meaningless.

 

"Publish or perish" is the motto in the field of scientific research, which helps to explain why there is this abundance of publications on all aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, some of them of questionable value.