Frankly, I think it's very poorly done, from a scientific analysis perspective. First off, the European countries haven't had their death peaks in response to case peaks yet, because there's a 2-4 week lag from case peak to death peak, as we just saw again in wave 2 in the US (I spent countless posts demonstrating that when people kept saying deaths weren't going up and I said they would and when and they did). We should start to see deaths peak in Spain (cases peaked at the end of August) very soon and in France in a few weeks (cases peaking now).
And I would expect their peaks to be even lower than the US peaks were in wave 2 vs. wave 1 - which were lower due to younger/milder cases being discovered in wave 2 vs. wave 1 (due to much better testing), combined with improved medical procedures/treatments being available in wave 2. That part is pretty clear when comparing hospitalizations, which aren't a function of testing (like cases are), vs. deaths. In our wave 2, the hospitalizations were the same as in wave 1 (despite twice as many cases in wave 2 - that illustrates the younger/milder part), but the deaths were about half of wave 1, which illustrates the improved procedures/treatments part.
It's just nutty to try to ascribe decreased deaths vs. hospitalizations to climate. In addition, he has Louisiana as a "late peak" state, which is simply wrong - the peak was greater early on, but because of lack of testing, it wasn't "seen" well, but the deaths were far greater in LA in wave 1, so to call that a late peak state, so it "fits" with his climate hypothesis is poor sleight of hand to me. And his climate map vs. seriousness of the outbreaks is simply childish with too many errors to even list.
What does “chicomvirus” mean? Serious question since I’ve only seen it in this thread. CHIneseCOMmunistVIRUS I believe. I've seen it used elsewhere but mostly on this forum.
rutgers.forums.rivals.com
Also, trying to say lockdowns don't affect cases or deaths is just stupid. Look at China and New Zealand as cases in point. They both essentially reduced transmissions to zero by harsh lockdowns (harsher than ours). Other countries, like SK, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, etc. kept cases far lower than we did by using aggressive testing, tracing and isolating, augmented by distancing/masking, with selected shutdowns of some parts of society, at times, but not like China/NZ. Our stay at home orders, which were not nearly as strict as some others, definitely worked to decrease cases, which is obvious, as cases stopped increasing a couple of weeks after the lockdowns and then deaths stopped rising a couple of weeks after that. As many experts have said (and I said even before our lockdowns), if we had locked down in the NE US 2 weeks earlier, we would've saved 75-90% of the lives lost in wave 1 and the reason we didn't do that, is we had no data showing how bad case growth really was, because we had zero testing until early March.
This isn't hard stuff really. For a novel coronavirus, which most have no defense for, people will simply get infected based on exposure and dose received from an infected person, with the severity likely a function of dose received, also, which is why most of the worst cases appear to be from prolonged contact, indoors, from family members. It doesn't matter whether it's hot or cold for the most part (unless that affects time spent indoors with infected people, which is the fear this fall/winter). Most experts think climate has very little to do with transmissions, directly. Forgive me for not re-finding and reposting a bunch of links, but I got stuff to do...