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The one factor that seems to slow outbreaks of the flu every season is warmer weather, come May, cases of influenza drop off.
Thanks to an ever-growing media and social media onslaught, we live in fear-based world. Fear over the coronavirus is growing to epic proportions.
As spring emerges, it brings an onslaught of weeds and people worried about whether it is safe use a weed killer. Attorneys, playing on the fear of cancer, bombard television viewers with advertisements promising a Roundup up cash settlement.
Similarly, news outlets desperate for eyeballs to fill their financial coffers, labor furiously for just the right fear-based headline to capture readers. Many physicians, rightly so, are saying this hysteria is overblown.
They remind all of us that the seasonal flu is much more deadly in terms of total numbers every year.
At the same time, doctors are pointing to numerous reasons we can release our fears and be hopeful this pandemic will soon die down.
First formulated in 1840, Farr’s Law of Epidemics states that they tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve.
Precisely as the Farr’s Law of Epidemics states – AIDS, SARS, Ebola — all followed that pattern. So does the seasonal flu each year.
Despite the fact that all epidemics have shown to follow this pattern, this fact has been ignored amid the hysteria that has emerged in every epidemic since and is now being overlooked again with the coronavirus.
The seasonal flu rises in fall and declines in spring. There is every reason to believe coronavirus will follow the same pattern.
Like the flu (influenza), coronavirus is a respiratory virus. Influenza thrives in cold and dry conditions, which is why flu season occurs in winter for the majority of the northern hemisphere.
By contrast, warmer weather that emerges in late spring, May in the northern hemisphere tends to slow down influenza, as the air becomes more humid.
Simply put, flu spreads more rapidly during cold and dry months, and vanishes during warmer and more humid months.
One reason this happens is that warmer air can hold more moisture, and this prevents airborne viruses from traveling. When the air is humid, the tiny droplets expelled by a cough or sneeze pickup more moisture in the air. Droplets containing the virus become too heavy to remain airborne and fall to the ground.
Experts expect coronavirus to behave in the same manner as influenza, and anticipate that it will die down as the weather warms up and becomes more humid.
