Introduction

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-diseasonality

The main highlight was an email I got from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, linking me to Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2. This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything painfully tried to piece together. Either my research skills suck, the epidemiology literature is a bunch of disparate subthreads with wildly differing levels of competence, or both.

The authors (including Marc Lipsitch who some of you might know from Twitter) are writing in May 2020, trying to predict the future course of COVID. To that end, they investigate the past course of two other coronaviruses called OC43 and HKU1, which cause mild colds. These show a seasonal pattern. Why?