COVID-19 Spread May Up When UV Levels Decrease

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Understanding the potential seasonality of COVID-19 transmission could help inform our response to the pandemic in the coming months," said Jonathan Proctor, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Data Science Initiative and the Harvard Center for the Environment. "These findings suggest that the incidence of COVID-19 may have a seasonal pattern, spreading faster in the winter when it's darker than in the summer." Analyzing daily COVID-19 and weather data from over 3,000 administrative regions in more than 170 countries, Proctor, together with co-authors Peter Huybers, also at Harvard University, Tamma Carleton and Kyle Meng from the University of California Santa Barbara and Jules Cornetet at France's École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, found that the spread of COVID-19 through a population tended to be lower in the weeks following higher UV exposure. Findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.