Scientists Thought (and Trump Insisted) Summer Heat Would Slow COVID-19. It Hasn't. Why?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Summer was supposed to save us. President Trump touted the idea back in February: “A lot of people think that [the virus] goes away in April, with the heat.” He followed that up a few months later with an insane rant about the wonders of sunlight and how “bringing light inside the body” might kill the virus.

But it wasn’t just Trump — dozens of scientific papers speculated that, like the flu, the coronavirus would melt away in the heat, sunlight, and humidity and we could all relax for a few months until a second wave of infection hit us in late fall. As the dependably idiotic presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner put it in April, “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”

Well, it’s mid-July, and guess what? The pandemic is raging out of control in America, with more than 3.3 million cases and 135,000 dead. And far from being tamed by the heat of summer, some of the hotspots for the spread of the virus – Texas, Arizona, Florida – also happen to be suffering unprecedented heat waves. Phoenix hit 116 degrees on Sunday, a new record for the year. Miami tied or broke a record high every day from Tuesday through Friday last week, and just a few weeks ago saw its hottest week ever recorded. In Texas, where I am writing this, and where public-health officials are bringing in refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow at hospital morgues, July record highs were set Monday in Amarillo (110 degrees), Lubbock (110 degrees), and San Antonio (107 degrees).

-snip-

Some scientists have suggested that the fact that heat causes people to cluster into air-conditioned rooms might contribute to the rise of infections, but Hotez says there is no strong evidence of this. “Bottom line,” Hotez says, “we are still in a steep learning curve for this virus, and we have to assume that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations [and] deaths will continue to accelerate across the southern U.S. and also expand into other regions of the country.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/why-summer-heat-does-not-slow-coronavirus-1028993/

Now president 'shit for brains' wants to suppress the data so he doesn't look bad.

[ThoughtCriminal]

1. Two factors

1 - Extreme heat does drive people indoors where they are more crowded and breathing the same air.
2 - These states have high populations of MAGAs that believe that wearing a mask and social distancing are the worst things since Gulags.

[LiberalArkie]

2. And it is a novel coronavirus... It is new, does not have the follow the old rules.

[Cicada]

3. Maybe it has slowed covid up, and it will explode in the fall

[MyMission]

4. And wishful or deluded thinking, "It's got to go away!"

As mentioned above, it's a novel virus and many scientists believed or hoped it would act like a flu and fade in the summer months, with varying degrees of probability. Many other scientists were cautious and practical in their predictions, assuming nothing other than it's infectious nature.

Rump administration seized on and encouraged the idea that it would just fade away.
They never took this as a serious threat, and sought to profit from it, and kept finding doctors or researchers to endorse or consider the hydroquinone.

Wishful thinking includes the ability to disregard facts and patterns (reality) in order to cling to misguided or delusional ideas/beliefs.

I'm surprised by the many people who believe it will (soon) be over, and things will go back to normal, the way things were; and they can't wait to stop needing to wear a mask.

I see masks in our future for quite some time, perhaps becoming a permanent fixture for many.

[Quixote1818]

5. Phoenix is extremely hot and is getting hammered the worst. nt