On March 6th Azabu Insights proposed a theory that coronavirus seemed to be spreading faster in cold countries than in warm countries. We followed this up with an update on March 11th showing that at that time the data was showing ninety-eight percent of the cases were all in cold countries.Since then we have had many comments from different people. One very respected business person who works in life sciences, told us he thought it was a, "multivariate problem," and suggested that, "It's possible, for example, that infection rate would be strongly correlated with people meeting in enclosed areas will less have outside air circulation." He was saying that our analysis might be true but it might not be, "because of the temperature," but because of something that "relates to temperature."
Another doctor said he thought it was because in spring people go outside more and they are less impacted by the dry air of air conditioning systems.
One hospital vice president, whom we highly respect, responded politely, "I do not think that COVID-19 relates to temperature."
Our conclusion on March 11th was: "As previously, we conclude that COVID-19 can spread in warm regions but seems to spread much more quickly in colder regions. We hope that countries and regions around the world will aggressively work to keep the virus at bay until the summer months and hope that the warm temperatures will support further containment."
You can see, then as now, we were certainly not 100% convinced that temperature was the driver or that temperature would save the day. But we do remain optimistic.
As recently as March 21, a virologist, Christian Drosten, who advises the German government in their so-far successful tackling of the coronavirus crisis, expressed some optimism that in the coming months we may have some success beating the virus. When asked about the effect of temperature, he responded: "This effect isn't likely to be particularly pronounced. It won't be able to stop the outbreak, but it may help a bit. And combined with the isolation measures, I strongly expect that we will see an impact in a month." It seems he also was not 100% convinced that higher temperature in summer months would solve things, but he thought it could help and envisioned more success at beating the virus spread in weeks ahead.
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