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by DyslexicAtheist 2305 days ago
EDIT:

--- As the replies to my comment indicate I have totally misunderstood the paper. And there IS in fact evidence that the temperature changes the transmission. Sorry my bad. leaving the rest as is ---

> I'm hoping Spring ends up curtailing the pandemic; letting warmer temperatures do their work requires slowing down the virus' spread as much as possible, and that requires significant disruptions to people's everyday lives.

from this paper "Temperature significant change COVID-19 Transmission in 429 cities": https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.22.20025791v...

> There is no evidence supporting that temperature changes COVID-19 transmission. Methods: We collected the cumulative number of confirmed cases of all cities and regions affected by COVID-19 in the world from January 20 to February 4, 2020, and calculated the daily means of the average, minimum and maximum temperatures in January. ....

EDIT: I'm also very worried about this point you mention:

> the PRC is putting the entire country on what amounts to wartime footing (in a way that's unimaginable to most HN readers),

the effect of isolation/quarantine can have massive psychological damage and after-effects (especially on kids), such as PTSD, depression, ... years after the virus is gone:

"The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Very much underrated. There isn't enough dialogue right now with the public about what they are likely to expect.

3 comments

To be clear, the "There is no evidence supporting that temperature changes COVID-19 transmission" is part of the background statement of the paper. The paper establishes evidence that temperatures do significantly effect transmission rates.
correct, I have messed up here. edited the orig. post to make it clear. thanks for pointing it out everyone.
Note that the quote above is the background of the paper, not the conclusion, which states:

"The study found that, to certain extent, temperature could significant change COVID-19 transmission, and there might be a best temperature for the viral transmission, which may partly explain why it first broke out in Wuhan. It is suggested that countries and regions with a lower temperature in the world adopt the strictest control measures to prevent future reversal"

That paper correlating temperature with transmission is comically bad. As stated above, the likelihood warmer temperatures by themselves will have any affect on COVID-19 transmission or deaths is close to zero.
I've been seeing comments all over that the temperature will reduce transmission, and even heard it cited in the news today. I'm very skeptic about this since citing SARS research is useless here.

fwiw trying to find evidence of this claim in studies relating to covid19 (peer reviewed or not) has so far yielded no results.

"citing SARS research is useless here"

Huh? SARS is the closest studied virus there is to COVID-19. It is certainly not useless. Of course there are no/few results for COVID-19, it didn't exist until a few months ago and even then was relatively unknown until about a end of January.