Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has spread across the world during early 2020, with unforeseen consequences. Beyond social measures and biomedical research, it is important to assess the seasonality of the epidemic to inform strategies, with limited available data in the short period of time between the March equinox and the June solstice. While the effect of multiple factors is being investigated, little attention has been paid to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, a key parameter of seasonal forcing. We review the effects of UV radiation, proposing it as a potential element of seasonality, and provide evidence from the current literature and scant, yet revealing, observations. Explicit consideration should be given to UV radiation for the seasonality of Covid-19 at high latitudes and altitudes, based on the SARS and MERS epidemics and coronavirus diseases, and not just the ‘warmer days’ of summer.
Highlights
The Covid-19 pandemic has spread across the world during early 2020, with unforeseen consequences
Much attention has been paid by news reports, publications, press releases, preprints and white papers concerning containment measures for the Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the highly infectious and contagious virus SARS-CoV-2 in the humanto-human transmission chain (Anderson et al, 2020)
At the time of initial writing and review in parallel with the appearance of these reports, Northern and Southern hemispheres were at the March (‘Spring’ for the North) Equinox or just after it, confounding real-time analysis and derivation of solid conclusions that connect the epidemic with seasonal fluctuations to a certain extent (BannisterTyrrell et al, 2020), with little or no evidence found for local temperature effects, e.g. Spain (Briz-Redón & Serrano-Aroca, 2020) or Japan (Ujiie et al, 2020)
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic has spread across the world during early 2020, with unforeseen consequences. Much attention has been paid by news reports, publications, press releases, preprints and white papers concerning containment measures for the Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the highly infectious and contagious virus SARS-CoV-2 in the humanto-human transmission chain (Anderson et al, 2020).
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