PLAGUE JOURNAL August 2021: Spain & Arizona; the Effects of Climate & Air-Conditioning on Coronavirus Spreading over Two Winters & Summers
Sunlight and warm weather slow the virus. Indoor heating and air-conditioning spread it. The media blame discos, beaches, and bad people.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
After the first coronavirus wave in the winter and spring of 2020, U.S. headlines fixated on the hot U.S. Sunbelt states in June, hot Midwestern states in July, cooling Upper Midwestern states in the early fall, and cooling Midwestern states in the late fall, focusing on red states each time. Wherever cases rose, the press blamed bad people.
Europe avoided the summer spreading we saw in the U.S. for two reasons: Europe has nowhere near the rates of air-conditioning that we have, and Europe had a sharper curve in the winter and spring, exposing more of their vulnerable populations to the virus. Their winter spike was higher than ours because Europe has a cooler, more temperate climate and is considerably farther north than the continental U.S., with shorter days and less sun.
Only about five percent of European homes are air-conditioned, compared to 91% of U.S. homes. (Japan has high rates of air-conditioning although the Japanese use it differently, cooling only some rooms, and to much higher temperatures than in the U.S., often only to the mid-80s.) The U.S. has vast regions that don’t require air-conditioning, including much of the north, the Mountain West, Alaska, and much of the West Coast. Nearly all homes in the U.S. Sunbelt are air-conditioned. March temperatures in Phoenix are similar to Paris temperatures in July, ranging from the 50s to the 80s (though Paris gets more rain). Phoenix was safe in March, when the virus ran wild in cold, gray Paris. Paris was safe in July, when Phoenix was as hot as Libya, sending people out of the sun into dry, sealed houses and apartments. Many Europeans consider air-conditioning unnatural and bad for their health; in the summer of 2020, when U.S. officials and talking heads were telling Americans to stay home, the Europeans were right.
Spain
As we move south in Europe, the climate changes, and so do attitudes towards air-conditioning. Spain’s climate has a few things in common with Arizona’s, though Spain is not as far south and not as hot. Both have cool, gray, temperate climates in their northeast in the winter, although Arizona’s is mostly semi-arid or desert while Spain’s is Koppen Cfb—the same oceanic climate that covers most of northern Europe. High elevation causes cool weather in both places. In the winter and spring of 2020, both saw much higher per capita coronavirus fatality rates in their cool northeast than in their warm southwest.
A screengrab from Wikipedia at the end of June 2020, after the initial wave, shows Spain’s cumulative rates were highest in the central and northeast regions, at 534 cases or more per 100,000 people. In the warm and sunny south, by contrast, there were fewer than 161 cases per 100,000. Andorra, a small principality in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France, had among the world’s highest coronavirus rates throughout 2020. As of early August 2020, Andorra ranked fourth-highest for fatalities per capita, after San Marino, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Spain ranked fifth. Italy, which surrounds San Marino, ranked seventh. France ranked eleventh. These places are neighbors; you could visit them all by car without passing through another country. They all share the same weather.
Four months later, at the beginning of December 2020, Andorra and Spain still ranked fourth and fifth. San Marino ranked second, and Italy ranked sixth. Despite what the headlines tell us, policies and politicians have little to do with coronavirus outcomes. The things that matter are weather, climate, immune systems, and indoor environments, especially in people’s homes.
Arizona
In the U.S., the press were mostly silent during the first wave about the low coronavirus rates in Phoenix and Tucson. They had been telling us from the start that population density drives infections, and they ignored the many places around the world that suggested otherwise. Arizona’s highest infection rates were in the empty northeast corner of the state. The media didn’t say much about that; the few stories that emerged blamed racial inequality. (Northeast Arizona has a high Native American population).
Even now, in late July 2021, after two blistering hot summers drove people indoors, the two Arizona counties with the highest total per capita fatalities are Apache and Navajo in the northeast corner of the state. Maricopa and Pima counties, which contain Phoenix and Tucson, aren’t even in the top half of Arizona’s fifteen counties for cumulative fatalities per capita. As we’ve seen around the world, summer spreading in air-conditioning can cause a lot of positive cases, but the cases are less severe than they are in cool, gray weather.
Although Apache and Navajo are Arizona’s two deadliest counties, Yuma, in the insanely hot southwest corner of the state, has the highest case rate. Although all of southern Arizona is scorching hot in the summer, Yuma is Arizona’s warmest winter city, which means it has a longer air-conditioning season than the rest of the state. Yuma is also America’s sunniest city. Although air-conditioning spreads cases, sun and heat cause them to be less severe. Cumulative infection rates in Apache and Yuma are nearly identical, at 16,295 vs. 16,298 per 100,000 respectively as of 7/27/2021. But Apache’s fatality rate is 65% higher, at 610 per 100,000 compared to Yuma’s 371 per 100,000.
The Media Blame Discos & Beaches for Spain’s Summer Cases
In Spain, as in Arizona, high fatality rates in the northeast in the winter were followed by high case rates in the southwest in the summer, when temperatures spiked on the sunny plains. After new cases in Spain slowed to a trickle by the start of summer 2020—which the press naturally attributed to Spain’s hard lockdown—the country relaxed its restrictions. A New York Times article from July 23rd tells us, “Spain lifted a nationwide state of emergency on June 21 as it emerged from a strict three-month lockdown imposed to gain control over one of Europe’s worst outbreaks.” It’s not surprising that Spain’s new cases had fallen to almost nothing by June 21st, the first day of summer and the longest day of the year, after months of warm (not too hot) sunny weather.
The article tells us that cases have quadrupled since June 21st, with many more young people affected than in the first wave. It says nothing about temperatures or air-conditioning, of course. The media see the world only in terms of policy and behavior, and the behavior they hate the most involves recreation or pleasure. The article begins, “After already enjoying a long night of graduation celebrations, a throng of young people poured into the Babylon discothèque at 5 a.m. to continue partying in the southern Spanish city of Córdoba.” Irresponsible youth having fun is the theme of the article, which includes this non-sequitur: “Local police were even forced to close some of Barcelona’s packed beaches over the weekend because of the risk of infection.” We’ve known since April 2020 that the virus doesn’t spread outdoors and hates sunshine and water. When officials close beaches and parks, people go indoors. In Spain, more than anywhere else in Europe, they go into air-conditioning.
All of the articles about Spain’s summer cases express the fear and alarm we are accustomed to. They tell us in worried tones that regional governments are taking a patchwork approach, although the approaches all sound pretty much the same: shut things down. We get the feeling that officials are panicking, remembering the runaway spreading from the winter. The article tells us that “hundreds of thousands of people in various parts of the country have been forced to return to temporary lockdowns, notably in the northeastern region of Catalonia, an area especially hard-hit before.” Notice they don’t tell us that Catalonia is experiencing a summer wave, only that they were hit in the winter. Catalonia sits in the far northeast, bordering France and Andorra in the Pyrenees, much of it under the European canopy of gray skies in the winter, among the worst places to be in March and April of 2020. Now, in the summer, although infections and fatalities were much lower, officials didn’t want to be seen as insufficiently tough.
Why did Cordoba have such a large outbreak? It has only 325,000 people. If nightclubs and beaches spread the coronavirus, as the press want us to believe, wouldn’t we see huge numbers in Spain’s larger cities? Many people go to discos in big cities, and many Spanish cities draw more tourists than Cordoba. Cordoba is an old city, important in Roman times and again under the Moors, famous for its mosque and its Jewish quarter. A top attraction is the Fiesta de los Patios, a competition in which residents compete to see who has the most beautiful patio. Cordoba is not a destination for young people looking for a party. It ranks tenth among Spanish cities for tourist visits, twenty-second in terms of population. But the press want us to believe it’s number one in irresponsible youth. So far as we know from the articles, the total number in the July outbreak is higher than anything in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao, or Malaga. If the media could have found a large outbreak in one of these places, they would have led with it. Cordoba is a relative backwater.
Instead of looking at places where young people splash a few drinks on each other, we should look at where they spend long hours with family or friends. People can spread the virus in a disco, which may be crowded, loud, and have stale air, but explosive spreading comes from serial infections in sealed buildings where people spend most of their time—in houses, apartments, and hotel rooms. Although 91 people who had visited the disco later tested positive, they didn’t all get infected at the disco. Many may have visited the disco only briefly during a long night of celebration; nearly all would have spent longs hours with many other people in any number of settings in the weeks before and after the night of July 10th. The story, as always from our corona press, is a morality play—not news, not journalism, not instructive.
What actually happened? The same thing that happened in Arizona a month earlier: temperatures soared. Madrid’s highs in May and early June 2020 averaged in the 70s to the low 80s—perfect Mediterranean spring weather. But then temperatures climbed, reaching 94 on June 21st—the day the restrictions were eased—and 99 on June 23rd. Highs remained in the mid- to upper nineties through July and most of August, sometimes clearing 100. Unlike France, Germany, and other European countries, Spain has a lot of air-conditioning. (They are modern in that way. They also use American oak on their wines, something the French would scoff at.) People went into air-conditioned houses and apartments.
U.S. Cases Follow Temperature & Air-Conditioning
The pattern is the same in the U.S. In a July 23rd, 2020 “The Morning” email, the New York Times told us proudly, “No region of the United States suffered a worse virus outbreak this spring than the Northeast—but few places have managed to bring it under such good control in the last couple of months.” The accompanying chart did not show the Northeast bringing anything “under control” but did perfectly illustrate the cool-winter/hot-summer pattern. Cases in the Northeast exploded in March and April when five mid-Atlantic states—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—experienced cool gray European weather. Cases fell in the summer when these places warmed, but Northeast cases “fell” mainly because summers are mild and air-conditioning is relatively uncommon in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upstate New York.
The “Northeast” grouping is arbitrary and meaningless; the climate of Burlington or Albany is nothing like the climate of Boston or New York City. But the Times editors wanted to show us that their favorite blue states crushed the virus. They are like a child who makes a trophy for himself for a contest that didn’t happen. They contrasted their hero states with the hottest places in the country, Texas and the Southeast, where air-conditioning is nearly universal and where people hide from the summer sun and heat beginning in June. In the South, cases are low in the winter and high in the summer.
In between the climate extremes of Maine and Florida, we have the Pacific Coast, which has cool coastal and mountain areas (low A/C), and hot inland areas including eastern Washington, central Oregon, and California’s Central Valley and southern desert (high A/C). The Times constructed their categories to show us who is good and who is bad. Our coast is best. The other coast is pretty good. The South is bad. Not surprisingly, they omit the vast middle of the country from their chart entirely, as the data wouldn’t support their case. The chart’s colors reveal their bias: the Northeast is blue, the color of virtue. The West Coast gets a green light. The South warrants caution. Texas is red, the color of armageddon and Republicans.
The chart tells us nothing about human control over a virus but tracks perfectly with outdoor temperatures and air-conditioning, from hot (high A/C) to cool (low A/C):
Air-Conditioning in Spain
About one in three Spanish homes has air conditioning. As in the U.S., the percentage ranges widely depending on the region. In Barcelona, 58% of homes have air-conditioning. In Madrid, 56% have it. In Bilbao, on the Bay of Biscay in the north, just 2.4% have it. In A Caruña, on the Atlantic Ocean in the northwest, just 1.4% have it.
Soria, in the mountains north of Madrid, is Spain’s second-highest provincial capital at 3,500 feet. July temperatures range from the mid-50s to the low 80s. Just 0.6% of Soria’s homes have air-conditioning. In the winter, Soria was in the crosshairs, one of the hardest-hit places in the world. A New York Times article from late April 2020 said, “In the province of Soria, about 120 miles north of Madrid, a death rate of more than one per 1,000 inhabitants has been more than double the national average.” We learn that “outbreaks overwhelmed for weeks the only hospital with intensive care units.” (The article also says, “Such rural stretches of Spain have among the lowest population density levels in Europe,” confounding the Times’ routine assertions that population density and crowding spread the coronavirus.) Soria’s daily temperature lows average 34 degrees in March and 37 degrees in April: classic spreader weather. But the risk flips from winter to summer. With comfortable mountain weather and virtually no air-conditioning, Soria is safe in the summer.
In the hottest parts of Spain, the sunny inland south, we find Europe’s highest air-conditioning rates. In Seville, 70% of homes have air-conditioning; in nearby Cordoba, 68% have it. Cordoba appears in the Times article blaming Spain’s summer cases on discos and beaches. The Cordoba nightclub graduation celebration took place on July 10th. The article tells us that 91 people who visited the nightclub that night tested positive over the following two weeks. It was one of the largest clusters in Spain at the time.
A comparison of Spain’s current summer “hotspots” (as of 8/18/2021) and Spain’s cumulative total shows the winter/summer split. For two summers, we’ve watched the same pattern unfold across the U.S., with headlines about heatwaves appearing alongside headlines about bad people suddenly ditching their masks—in the exact same places as the heatwaves. The press were too busy making up stories about bad people to notice the patterns.
In Spain, the north is cool while the south is hot—similar to Arizona. A Spaniard of means looking to stay safe could simply spend winters in Malaga and summers in Bilbao. Closer to home, I noticed a lot of people from Boston and New York in Denver this last winter, escaping the cool gray for East the warm sunny West.
Spain Coronavirus Summer & Winter Maps
A comparison of mid-August 2021 “hotspots” with total cumulative per capita cases since the beginning gives us another view of the summer/winter split. Castilla La Mancha, in the middle of the country, has high coronavirus rates in both the winter and the summer. Winter temperatures in the city of Albacete are similar to those in northern Spain, with lows averaging in the mid-30s from mid-November to mid-March. Yet Albacete also has significant air-conditioning, with 30% of homes cooled. Madrid is worst of all, with the cool, gray winter weather of the north and even more air-conditioning than Albacete in the summer, a whopping (for Europe) 56%. As we can see in the second map, Madrid has the highest cumulative rates in all of Spain.
Galicia, poking into the Atlantic Ocean in the northwest, on the other hand, faces the lowest risks. Winter temperatures seldom fall below the high 40s or 50s, and summers are cool, with virtually no air-conditioning. Andalucia, in the inland south, is hot, relatively safe in the winter but at risk in the summer. The cities Cordoba and Seville have the highest rates of air-conditioning in Spain. At the time of this weekly snapshot, seven of the last ten days in Seville were 100 degrees or higher.
The Times and other publications pretend that discos are the problem and that the solution is to close them. We would be smarter to keep them open, with doors and windows open to the outside and with large fans blowing air through. Instead, we learn that “the Catalan regional leader, Quim Torra, urged, rather than ordered, about three million people living around Barcelona to stay indoors and ‘demonstrate that we are a society of solidarity.’” By “indoors,” we know he means at home, in small, sealed, air-conditioned boxes, demonstrating solidarity as they pass the virus around.
From the start, our policy has been illogical at best and often completely backward, yet if we say anything, we are loudly condemned as “anti-science.” The Times expressed frustration at the wayward Spanish, telling us that “only two of Spain’s 17 regions—Madrid and the Canary Islands—have not reimposed requirements to wear face masks at all times outdoors.” When we close outdoor spaces or make them unpleasant (and less safe) by requiring masks, are we surprised that the people of Spain, like the people in the U.S. Sunbelt in the summer, spread the virus in their homes? Do we not notice that summer cases are much lower in areas without air-conditioning, where windows and doors remain open and people spend time in the sun and air? Our policies and the endless media bullying about masks and shutdowns are counterproductive and soul-killing. A few PSAs advising us to open windows, buy fans, drop a few pounds, and spend time at the beach would be far better for our physical and mental health than the nonstop superstition and hectoring we’ve become accustomed to.