It is impossible to know whether the UK’s coronavirus outbreak will get worse this winter, according to researchers.
Concerns are growing that Britain will be hit by a second wave of Covid-19 when the weather turns colder and that the current drop in infections and deaths is merely a reprieve.
Matt Hancock, along with the Government’s top scientific advisers, have warned a second national lockdown could be necessary to control the coronavirus. The Health Secretary yesterday said his current priority is ‘preparing for winter’.
Many scientists predict the coronavirus will act in a similar fashion to colds and the flu and become problematic when the weather is cold and people spend more time indoors, because people are closer together and more likely to spread it.
But the data we have so far is not enough to prove this will be the case, according to Oxford University scientists. The virus — scientifically called SARS-CoV-2 — is still shrouded in mystery and has only been known to science for six months.
They argue that hot countries have been badly hit by Covid-19, suggesting it is not significantly weakened by heat, and also that worse weather outdoors could make more people get tested because they’re more likely to get coughs and colds.
And this could, therefore, lead to more false positive results and mean more people test positive — even though the virus is not actually more prevalent in society, the scientists claimed.
The study comes just a day after other research, involving King’s College London, linked a 1°C increase in temperature to a 15 per cent decline in deaths caused by the coronavirus, adding to concerns that a second wave will emerge in the winter.
Dr Francois Cohen and colleagues said the change in weather could affect how accurate testing data is and therefore how bad the outbreak appears. In the top graph, they show that true positive tests (green) may be lower in colder weather but surrounded by more false positives (red) because more people get tested because of routine coughs and colds
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