Follow Up Research to Test Seasonality for Covid-19 Started

Today, Elsevier Science Direct published our article identifying the “missing link” between meteorological conditions such as – Temperature, UV light and Relative Humidity – and Flu-like (incl. corona) incidence: “Pollen likely seasonal factor in inhibiting flu-like epidemics. A Dutch study into the inverse relation between pollen counts, hay fever and flu-like incidence 2016–2019“.

The Icecat research has already been well-covered in The Netherlands by a recent article of FD (the Dutch financial times).

Soon the free link will be made available by Elsevier Science as their contribution to fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Please, see the pre-print version if the free online version is not yet available.

Follow-up research to test Pollen-Flu Seasonality

What are the next steps? Currently, we are working on expanding the research to test the seasonality on the Covid-19 pandemic, in co-operation with a professor clinical virology of Erasmus Medical Center, an epidemiologist PhD from Jeroen Bosch Medical Center and my Icecat data scientist colleagues, and work out in more detail the explanatory pathways. Also from the business side, interest has been shown to join the project to identify the “missing link” explaining the seasonality of Covid-19 and flu-like epidemics.

Predictability and identifying new anti-viral therapies

Why is this so much of interest? First, it increases the predictability of the Covid-19 pandemic’s seasons, their starting points and end points, which implies that we can better time the institution or relaxation of lockdown-like measures to contain the pandemic. And thus avoid over-reacting with the economy damaging effects observed. Second, it provides new ideas for researching potential immuno-activation therapies that might work for all flu-like viruses by further identifying the antiviral or immuno-activation properties of (certain) pollen.