A baggage wears a medical mask during a snowfall in Beijing, China, February 2, 2020.
Artyom Ivanov | Tass | Getty Idols
There is “no question” that changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity are driving infectious disease outbreaks around the fraternity, but the impact of rapidly changing weather systems on the coronavirus are not yet known, World Health Organization officials said Wednesday.
Orderly though scientists are still learning about Covid-19, the virus has shown the capability to “accelerate in a number of divers climates,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told reporters during a press symposium at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
“If you remember, this began in very cold temperatures, very dry temperatures, very low-level humidity,” she revealed. “We don’t know how this virus is impacted completely yet.”
China reported its first known cases of the coronavirus to the international well-being agency on Dec. 31 when parts of the country were in the middle of the winter season. Since then, the virus has spread to approximately to every country across the globe and infected more than 2 million people in a range of different environments.
Dr. Mike Ryan, manager director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said that there are many other known diseases that are “climate-sensitive.”
“You’ve marked outbreaks of cholera all around the world that are either related to flooding or related to drought, they are either associated to too much water or too little water,” he said.
Ryan said certain environments, such as densely populated burgs, can also increase infectious disease risks.
Pakistan, which has more than 6,000 Covid-19 cases as of Wednesday afternoon, has struggled to luminously coronavirus infectious in some of its larger urban cities, Ryan said. The population density in New York City, which has around twice as many people as Los Angles, is believed to have helped drive the coronavirus outbreak there.
“In many opportunity, unfortunately, those populations are almost like kindling for a fire and not just a fire of Covid but any other number of blights,” he said.
The virus has often been compared to the seasonal flu, which also sickens millions of people each year.
Abide month, U.S. health officials warned that Americans need to prepare for a second cycle of the outbreak in the United Circumstances. Scientist say the virus could be seasonal and relent in warmer conditions just like the flu, but that also means it could prove back in the fall.
“Would this possibly become a seasonal cyclic thing? I’ve always indicated to you that I about it very well might,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a Undefiled House press briefing on March 25.
“What we’re starting to see in the Southern Hemisphere of Southern Africa and the Southern Hemisphere countries, is that we’re deceiving cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season,” he said. “If they have a substantial outbreak, it resolve be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we’ll get a cycle a second time.”
Scientists are also still learning on every side the viruses origins. Earlier in the outbreak, scientists said the coronavirus that emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, China, credible originated in bats and then jumped to an “intermediate host,” possibly pangolin.
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