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Comment by rogerthis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not much aware of details, but it seems it's thriving here in Brazil.

Do people in Brazil and Australia use Air Conditioners? Air Conditioners reduce both temperature and humidity and make a more favorable environment for COVID-19 transmission. The use of Air Conditioners in very low in India because only the richest can afford them.

Likewise in Australia. I suspect this study hints that person to person transmission is not affected but that the virus has lower viability via surface spread in hot and humid climates.

Australia is much more densely packed in Urban areas than other countries like India and in spite of favorable weather conditions the person to person transmission is high. They haven't enforced the shelter in place yet

I am very confused at the shockingly low cases in India, and the Indochina region.

Either it really is the climate or we’re talking zero testing and a fiasco that’s gonna engulf that region soon.

My theory about India, is that because of poor hygiene, anyone with a weak immune system already died from something else.

It depends on travel links with Wuhan. India is somewhere below top 10 in that list.

Perhaps because India is not testing?

If you don’t test, then you cannot confirm someone has the virus. Thus, your confirmed cases remains low.

India has not shown up on the map yet, but I suspect that the virus is picking up steam. Every week, the numbers slowly increase. And by the time someone is confirmed with the virus, then they probably already infected 10 to 20 other people.

Sorry? Australia's biggest cities are orders of magnitude less dense than Indian cities. Think 10-100x less.

While I don't know for sure what ganeshkrishnan intended, I'm going to take from the name and comment ganesh knows both countries. Perhaps what Ganesh meant is the while the population density in those Australian cities is very low, Australia has a highly urbanised population. ~11% of India's population are urbanised, 2/5 ths of australia's population is in just two cities. You hear figures for 80 or 90% of Australia's population is urbanised, but I don't have a cite.

I didn't mean the population density. I meant the density of urban vs rural spread. Australia has the world's highest urban ratio (around 96%) and extremely well connected. India is more spread out.

I think the real reason why India has a low count (for now!) is because it's a world away from China in terms of people travelling to each other while Australia is very deeply connected to Australia (students + mining export).

Where its hot and humid and positive cases are still showing up look at travel link density with China.

I guess this factor is not studied enough. Italy had significant presence of Chinese workers due to them being part of BRI.

I am in Catalunya in Spain its humid here, (not quite hot at this time of year) and we have plenty of cases.

As I understand it, hotter weather helps to prevent the progression of the disease from the upper respiratory to the lower respiratory. When the disease moves to the lower respiratory area, patients typically need hospitalization and a ventilator, and are at a much higher risk of death. If you look at the death rates in Brazil and Australia, they are lower than in the northern hemisphere. Likewise, countries with ample spare ICU beds and ventilators (like Germany) have lower death rates than countries that don't (like Italy).

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