Hi Littlelist, sorry about the delayed response. I intended to...

Hi Littlelist, sorry about the delayed response. I intended to respond earlier to your question, however lately I have only been able to find the time to log into Hotcopper a few times a week.

One positive of this is that in the meantime I've been able to make some improvements to the chart.

The chart in my earlier post was based on the data from the John Hopkins coronavirus map: I simply took all the data for all the countries that were showing on the website and built a chart from the data depicted.

But I realised there were two problems with this approach. Firstly, the chart was just too crowded. Secondly, I had a feeling that with some of the smaller countries, such as Bahrain and Qatar, the sample size was too small to be meaningful.

To get around this, I've put together a new chart which only includes data for the 80 largest (by population) countries in the world which have recorded at least one coronavirus case (including the Hubei region of China).

Yesterday, I repopulated this new chart with the latest data, and the results are depicted below.

Remember, the blue line depicts the average annual temperature for each country/region, with the orange representing the number of coronavirus cases per capita for each country or region.

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I think there are two things that really stand out on the graphic above.

Firstly, there is a dramatic difference in the number of covid-19 cases in the hotter, equatorial countries (to the left of the chart) and the temperate/colder countries, in the middle of the chart and on the right hand side.

This seems to support the notion that the coronavirus doesn't thrive in hotter countries, possibly due to the high temperatures, or perhaps due to increased humidity, or a combination of the two.

This isn't to suggest that covid-19 isn't a problem in the hotter, equatorial countries: Malaysia and Qatar, for example, currently have over 400 confirmed cases, and Singapore has over 200.

But this is nowhere near the numbers of the worst impacted temperate or colder countries. While the worst impacted equatorial countries have hundreds of cases, the worst impacted colder countries have thousands. Bear in mind that Malaysia and Singapore were also amongst the first countries to be caught up in the coronavirus contagion.

It is also worth noting that the hotter countries that have the most significant problems with coronavirus are all wealthy countries. This ties into the point you made about air-conditioning systems possibly playing a role in the coronavirus epidemic: the wealthy countries would have plenty of air-conditioned homes and offices, and it is plausible that these might represent ideal environments for the virus.

This leads to the second point of interest on the above chart.

One trend that has really become obvious in the past week is the spike in covid-19 cases in colder countries.

It isn't widely realised, but based on the official figures, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway are the second, third and fourth worst coronavirus impacted countries in the world, based on a case per-capita basis.

Once again, this goes to the point you raised about air conditioning. In these colder countries, people would spend much of their time indoors, in temperature controlled environments. The spike evident in covid-19 cases in these cold countries strongly suggests that such environments are ideal for the coronavirus.

In summary, the data at this stage indicate that the countries most at risk from coronavirus are temperate/mediterranean countries such as Italy, Iran and Spain, and colder countries such as Denmark or Norway

The countries at the lowest level of risk seem to be developing, equatorial countries such as India, Mexico and Vietnam. In fact, the disease seems to be progressing at a snails pace in most of these countries, and so I'd be willing to suggest that the virus probably isn't going to be a major problem here.

If so, good news for Vmoto, given that they have exposure to many such countries.