Answering Key COVID-19 Questions: New Research Tackles Increased Risk Among the Elderly and Whether Virus Will Slow This Summer

Will summer stop the virus?

The temperature experiment aims to prove or disprove the hope that the virus will fade during the warmer summer months. The plan is to lay coronavirus-like nanoparticles onto surfaces at different temperatures, then incubate those particles with cells and see how the uptake changes.

The argument for COVID-19 fading in the summer comes from its relative, SARS, after the spread of that virus slowed in the summer of 2003. However, Harvard researchers recently noted that SARS faded not because of the change in season but aggressive government intervention. They predicted COVID-19 could become slightly less contagious in the summer, but a change in temperature likely won’t be enough to make it disappear entirely.

Parekh noted the number of cases in countries in the Southern Hemisphere, in the midst of the warmest time of the year, is much lower than in Northern Hemisphere nations. There could be plenty of reasons for this — the bulk of the world’s population resides in the Northern Hemisphere and a lack of testing in some areas makes the data hard to count on. But Parekh says he “doesn’t have skin in the game one way or the other;” he just wants to provide some answers.

He asks, “What does the outside temperature have to do with the infection, or does it not have anything to do with it? Do the virus just dry (cake) onto surfaces, making infection much less efficient; are there molecular changes in viral coat proteins that limit infection? Or, are we just healthier in the summer because our immune systems aren’t taxed as much so it’s easier to fight against the infection?”

Parekh is working on both experiments with postdoctoral researchers Sachin Kumar and Alexandra Paul and first-year graduate student Christian Jennings.