Early in the pandemic, some believed that the arrival of summer would make COVID-19 cases drop, much like the flu. In March 2020, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro implied that his country should not expect a COVID-19 crisis like that in Italy at the time, given the “totally different” climates of the two places. “Maybe this goes away with heat and light,” said then–US President Donald Trump the following month.
But the increased number of cases in the US and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere in the summer of 2020 contradicted these predictions. Moreover, the tropics were not spared from high death tolls, despite their lack of wintry weather. Brazil and India emerged, for instance, as two of the leading pandemic hotspots.
These events illustrate that climate has not governed whether COVID-19 emerges or vanishes in a given place or time. But nearly two years after the first reported cases, ...
