By wild guess you mean ignoring the comically epic pile of overwhelming evidence that shows climate is a very large factor in impeding the spread of the virus (and applies to locations regardless of testing rates or economic condition)?

I've been talking about this on HN for a while now. I've been making the same case over and over.

Guess what hasn't changed since I first floated it here? The higher temp areas I've been touting under this theory have continued to be spared compared to the Covid Belt climate areas, despite predictions by the so-called experts that everyone would be hit (the same experts that are so baffled by Texas and California). It's not testing or luck or lockdown measures or tracing. Texas did everything wrong compared to eg South Korea, they should look like New York / New Jersey / Michigan / Massachussets. It's the climate providing a big assist.

I've seen some really outlandish articles dancing around it. What crazy magic is this, that is protecting these states?!?

It's the climate.

Epidemiologists don't think so? Which ones? It's a proven fact that coronaviruses and influenza are both impeded by higher temperatures. What I'm describing makes perfect sense. We already know there is a direct correlation between higher temps and lower viability of such respiratory viruses.

From 2011 & SARS: "The Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity on the Viability of the SARS Coronavirus"

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/av/2011/734690/

MIT recent observation with SARS-CoV-2: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/19/905217/coronavir...

March from China: "High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767

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.