There will not be a vaccine soon, but anti-viral drugs are currently in an FDA approved Phase 3 trial, and from what I have heard could be both approved and available in May.
There is evidence that higher temperatures will limit the spread: Africa has so far been mostly spared, and warm places like Singapore are doing much better than Japan or South Korea.
Too early to have confidence on higher temperatures limiting spread IMO (although some reason to hope, certainly); cases in japan are only <2.5x higher than singapore (234 vs 102 last I saw, and IIRC it got to japan slightly earlier); surveillance and testing in African nations unlikely to be as extensive as e.g. Japan/SK; likely less volume of travel going through african nations than some of the Asian hubs.
Singapore also ranked lower on lists published in late January on “most at risk countries” compared to Japan and Korea. Thailand (first on that list) would be a better example for a warm location being hit less badly than predicted. It reported a lot of cases initially, but it indeed seems like the virus hasn’t spread as much as in some other locations. Warmth could be the decisive factor, but there might also be other reasons.
Singapore is also one of the nations that appears to be dealing most effectively with their coronavirus outbreak (rate of new cases is comparatively low). The country also had a very effective response to SARS in 2003. (Although by Western standards the extent to which they gather information on the population might be uncomfortable).
I just read (surprisingly to me) that Thailand ranks extremely high in pandemic preparedness and early detection. This makes me downshift the warmth hypothesis a bit.
FWIW I now think that warm conditions very likely do slow down transmissions by a lot. Mostly because there are many cold countries where outbreaks became uncontrollable quickly, and this happened nowhere in a hot country so far.
This blog post suggests (based on Google Search Trends) that other coronavirus infections have typically gone down steadily over the course of March and April. (Presumably the data is dominated by the northern hemisphere.)
There will not be a vaccine soon, but anti-viral drugs are currently in an FDA approved Phase 3 trial, and from what I have heard could be both approved and available in May.
There is evidence that higher temperatures will limit the spread: Africa has so far been mostly spared, and warm places like Singapore are doing much better than Japan or South Korea.
Too early to have confidence on higher temperatures limiting spread IMO (although some reason to hope, certainly); cases in japan are only <2.5x higher than singapore (234 vs 102 last I saw, and IIRC it got to japan slightly earlier); surveillance and testing in African nations unlikely to be as extensive as e.g. Japan/SK; likely less volume of travel going through african nations than some of the Asian hubs.
Singapore also ranked lower on lists published in late January on “most at risk countries” compared to Japan and Korea. Thailand (first on that list) would be a better example for a warm location being hit less badly than predicted. It reported a lot of cases initially, but it indeed seems like the virus hasn’t spread as much as in some other locations. Warmth could be the decisive factor, but there might also be other reasons.
The information Singapore is gathering, collating and making available is fascinating.
https://twitter.com/RyutaroUchiyama/status/1234616723615166465
Singapore is also one of the nations that appears to be dealing most effectively with their coronavirus outbreak (rate of new cases is comparatively low). The country also had a very effective response to SARS in 2003. (Although by Western standards the extent to which they gather information on the population might be uncomfortable).
I just read (surprisingly to me) that Thailand ranks extremely high in pandemic preparedness and early detection. This makes me downshift the warmth hypothesis a bit.
Where did you read this?
I don’t remember the exact source, sorry.
FWIW I now think that warm conditions very likely do slow down transmissions by a lot. Mostly because there are many cold countries where outbreaks became uncontrollable quickly, and this happened nowhere in a hot country so far.
This blog post suggests (based on Google Search Trends) that other coronavirus infections have typically gone down steadily over the course of March and April. (Presumably the data is dominated by the northern hemisphere.)
Update: this blog post is a much better-informed discussion of warm weather.