Do you have any sources? Epidemiologists don't think that temperature has been playing a major role here, so do you have any sources that's not just you hypothesizing this?

Because one trend I see a lot on HN is people making wild guesses about things waaaaaaay outside their area of expertise ...

I appreciate the effort you're putting in to this and it's a shame you're getting downvoted this heavily.

I would want to see a very careful treatment of this data before I could be convinced that temperature is a greater factor in transmission rates than stay-at-home policies or population density. It would be really easy to cherry-pick examples.

A couple of counter-examples that come immediately to mind are Chicago and Florida. Chicago's climate should fit your model but they have about 1/3rd the cases per capita vs New York City. Florida meanwhile should be warm enough to be outside of your "Covid Belt", but cases there are expanding extremely rapidly and it's likely to overtake Washington state in per capita cases and deaths. Louisiana similarly has one of the highest per capita death rates in the nation.

Climate might be one factor, but it's not clear that it's a big factor, let alone the most important one.

Can you put together some actual data then? Like, get all the relevant data for hospitalizations and deaths by locality and find a correlation against climate data? And then do the same for things like density, how early and strictly social distancing measures were put into effect, etc., and see if it has more or less correlation than those?

My gut feeling here is that climate is not a significant factor, but that those others are. And you haven't come close to actually demonstrating it with rigor beyond it just being a guess that you have (which is fine; guesses are useful).

And you're right, the connection between climate and the spread of a disease is well known, which is why if it were relevant here there would be lots of people besides you talking about it. The articles you linked do seem to show that the virus might not survive for quite as long on surfaces at high temperatures and humidities, but that's just not really that relevant for how this disease spreads. People are primarily either inhaling droplets directly, or touching things that others have touched recently and then getting it into their face. The virus surviving for hours on a surface before being touched and then touched again to a face orifice was always on the long tail of transmission methods, so flattening that tail a little bit doesn't make a meaningful difference in the overall spread of the virus.

It seems to all fit together but I would not be too hasty in proclaiming the actual heat to be the affecting factor. Colder place will naturally be more densely populated for example.

> Colder place will naturally be more densely populated for example.

That's plainly wrong. The world has huge numbers of hot, very dense cities that have not been hit hard. The Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, India all have obvious of examples.

Mexico City should be in extremely bad shape right now.

Check out the temps in Mexico City: https://weather-and-climate.com/uploads/average-temperature-...

Here are the top 10 most densely populated US metro zones (per the 2010 US census; population per sq mile):

Los Angeles, SF + Oakland, San Jose, NYC + NJ + CT (isolated, NYC is the most dense), Las Vegas, Miami, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, New Orleans

Also, Riverside CA is #12, Phoenix AZ is #16. Both have been largely spared.

Now look at the per capita Covid deaths in LA, the Bay Area, Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Phoenix, Riverside. Then compare it to the Covid Belt areas.

If New Orleans hadn't made the mistake of holding Mardi Gras, they would look like other urban areas in Louisiana and the south broadly and would have dramatically fewer cases (eg Mississippi has 1/10th the deaths of Louisiana with 2/3 the population; Florida has over 4x the population of Louisiana, with half the deaths).

The Virginia Beach + Norfolk area is #22 on population density. It has so few deaths it barely registers. A couple million people live in that area, there have been only a handful of deaths. Average highs are 61 degrees F in November, around 50 from Dec > Feb, then 58 in March. ~12-15 degrees warmer than NYC throughout Winter. It never sinks into the Covid Belt ideal temperature zone, comparable to Milan, Wuhan, NYC, etc.

Check out most of the major cities in Florida. They're doing extremely well. The Jacksonville area has a dozen deaths in a metro of 1.5 million. Tampa and Orlando have done similarly well.

It's way too early to be making any definitive statements over what area has been hard hit or not. All we know right now is who got hit by it first, not worst.