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Please explain how

Increased mucous production leading to higher transmissibility? more time spent indoors? drier air (that one was new to me) we don't actually know the mechanisms exactly, but there's some causal vector between cold weather and colds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#weather

Colds are more frequent in cold weather due to increased proximity and transmissibility. Bundling up better when outdoors won’t protect you against a cold.

oh I forgot the old wives tale was literally direct exposure rather than the season

Yup! I really think my cat understands words. But he might be picking up on body language, or randomly iterating through a short list of behaviours until he gets a response. Human nature, closely studied, is unintuitive. I have to assume feline nature might be too.

Cold weather creates the social and somatic conditions that increase the effective infectiousness of viruses.

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