As we look for clues to better understand the COVID-19 pandemic, valuable insights can be gained from researching both detailed and holistic disease patterns. Lenny Landau, an allegedly retired mechanical engineer who worked with General Electric for more than 40 years and is dubbed “the Data King” by his local community, directed his analytical skills to better understand environmental drivers of the COVID-19 disease. The outcome of Landau’s investigations into publicly available data is revolutionary.
Landau and I began working together to explore national and global data on indoor humidity, SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and COVID-19 disease trends. As the second COVID-19 winter approached, we predicted that cases would increase as outdoor temperatures fell, heating systems were turned on, and indoor relative humidity dropped, following the same timeline as other seasonal respiratory viruses. As we predicted, the daily COVID-19 infection rate increased when cold weather set in, heat was turned on, and indoor humidity levels plummeted. We were startled, however, by a sudden new infection rate trajectory in a subset of U.S. states. While new infections in the southeastern U.S. increased as expected, case numbers in 18 contiguous midsection states dropped dramatically — even though outdoor temperatures and indoor humidity remained consistently very low.