Covid seems to spike twice a year—but unlike with flu season, not in a predictable pattern. That could be due to the virus, the environment, or the people it is infecting.
flu shots are rolling out in pharmacies, and pediatricians are watching for an uptick in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In other words, it’s virus season. Covid” now? It’s an important question, because knowing when cases will surge could help public health officials and health care administrators plan for vaccines, treatments, and hospital staffing—and might prompt everyone else to be a little more self-protective.
In other words, what looks like a season might be an artifact created by our behavior, not the virus’s. The way our bodies“As we get more used to seeing this virus, our immunity builds up a little more and a little more—so the time between the winter surge and the summer surge gets longer and longer,” says David Dowdy, a physician and professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
To say that a virus is seasonal seems self-evident: at a particular point in the year, cases begin; at some further point, they subside. But “seasonality” conceals mysteries, even for the flu. Environmental changes—in ambient temperature, humidity, or the duration of UV light—might combine to create optimal conditions for the flu’s return. So might anatomical responses to those changes, such as theand the epithelium of the respiratory tract.
A similar infrastructure could be built to prepare for Covid, too. Predicting the virus’s likely arrival could ensure that fresh boosters are developed and shipped well in advance of a surge, and get to where they are needed. Trustworthy predictions of Covid’s future behavior could also exert more subtle effects, allowing drug manufacturers to envision demand and hospitals to stress-proof capacity.
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