Aria Bendix

Jul 15, 2020, 12:37 AM

I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we've experienced in American public health," Redfield said during a webinar with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-robert-redfield-deadly-coronavirus-surge-fall-winter-2020-7

Daily Briefing

All of those mitigation efforts will be especially important as countries enter their winter seasons. "Things get a bit more dangerous" in the winter months, Bhatt said.

Experts predict that areas seeing colder temperatures during the second half of this year will also see increases in their rates of new coronavirus cases.

“I expect [the coronavirus] infection rate, and also potentially disease outcome, to be worse in the winter," Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, said.

That's because cold temperatures tend to drive people indoors, where transmission of the virus is more likely, according to Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

In addition, Iwasaki explained that research suggests dry winter air can improve the stability and transmissibility of respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus, and immune defense within the respiratory tract could be weakened by dry air.

https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2020/08/14/covid-future