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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

I hope they're right but I worry these conclusions are premature.

There's evidence of community transmission in Singapore which currently has rather warm and humid weather.

Honestly just look at the current world map[0] - it seems the statistics in this paper may be out of date. Not to mention were starting to see early spread in third world countries like India which are unlikely to comprehensively test for it, at least not in the short term. The data in this paper may be biased.

Given the relatively slow progression of the outbreaks, if Italy is any model, India and South America are about to have a bad time in the next 3-6 weeks. Let's hope otherwise.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_...

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I've read a theory that the reason Singapore has so many is because of air conditioning being used so much.

What do you mean by "so many"? Singapore appears to be an amazing success story in containing C19.

They are using aggressive contact tracing as part of that, so if it were spreading like wildfire through A/C vents surely that wouldn't be effective and they would have a much faster growth rate of cases.

I don't think the assertion is that it's spreading through vents, just that spending time in a very air conditioned room mimics some of attributes of winter that make the spread of respiratory viruses more likely (dry air, dry nasal passages)

There may be something to this. If you look at the actual cases in Singapore, they seem to be clustered around two specific locations, one company and a single event which I would presume was held inside a single big hall.

I'm in Singapore, and life here goes on pretty much as it always has. Except for a larger than normal number of people wearing masks, you can't really tell that this is ongoing.

That said, the government is doing a lot to keep it that way. There is intensive contact tracing, and companies register people going in and out of their offices (to help tracing), if you're sick you're supposed to stay at home, and so on.

There's also been community transmission in Sweden as well. Sweden is further north than 50 degree latitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_S...

They didn't make "conclusions" without making it very clear that this is a novel coronavirus and more data is needed. But they do conclude that so far the novel corona virus is acting like other corona viruses in terms of climate sensitivity.

Singapore is an outlier in the region. Though may also be a victim of being proactive about testing.

Another outlier about SNG: you can't go anywhere without catching public transport. Car ownership is essentially unviable for even the above-average person.

People have no choice but to get into highly crowded canisters each day simply to go to work or visit family.

To me that's the big difference regardless of latitude. Another factor is how incredibly popular it is as a Chinese New Year destination along with regular trade.

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