Polarization: In the Desert Southwest, People go INDOORS in Summer.

Barr Nun:

 Creating an hospitable climate for an infection on the body politic.

As the US and the world struggle to come out of lockdown without corona-virus numbers roaring back, the toll of making a puerile sport of a pandemic by politicizing it for twitter and TV soundbites takes on starkly grim characteristics. For while one party argues that we must save the economy by re-opening in the face of escalating infection rates, the other insists that tens of thousands of people doing exactly what the NIH recommends they not do, had no effect on the virus spiraling out of control during the precise timeframe when it would have done so if it were true. The idea that their "opponents" arguments that church gatherings have an equivalent moral imperative has no effect on the street protesters' sense of the moral justification for their own actions.

But since I posited in a post I entitled The Heat is ON, that, "if the Chinese reporters are correct, as they have been all along, and AC helps spread the virus, the long hot summer we are about to experience could very rapidly turn into a nightmare".

Which it has.

Yet even as the East coast cities, where Springtime and warm weather brings more and more of the populace to spend a greater amount of their time outdoors where they are less likely to be infected by asymptomatic carriers, it has gone completely uncommented on that in the exact locations the virus is making the greatest headway are in just those places where the summers' heat has the opposite effect, driving people who were outdoors for many of their activities INdoors for a cooldown from the stifling heat.

People in Phoenix like to chide visitors to their hideous city who complain it is like living inside a blast furnace that, just as you snowbirds go inside during the winter, we go inside during the summer, coming out to enjoy what is ideal weather during that time of year when you are all shivering from the cold and shoveling yourself out of snowdrifts.

Florida, Texas, Arizona, Southern California's Imperial Valley and Orange/LA counties, all have spiked to their highest levels of contagion yet since the beginning of the pandemic precisely when I said  they would, and for the exact reason: Air Conditioning.

The fact that there has been no proof that A/C (which was the topic of the Chinese study referenced above, one that hypothesized that the flow of air used to cool it could be instrumental in spreading the deadly microbe) has gotten exactly zero attention, even as the temperature of the entire globe is spiking to give us the hottest atmosphere humanity has ever roasted itself in; preferring as we do, to blaming one another's actions, or inactions, to explain the sudden increase in infections.

But even if it is not A/C per se that is causing the spike, and there's as yet no reason to assume it's not, just the existence of the cool environment A/C provides to the sweltering masses means that in a region where people were not in the kind of close proximity to each other in late February and March when the virus was making its invisible inroads into our most vulnerable populations in the Northeast, the Southwest's populations were not so inclined to spend their time gathered in such indoor enclaves, or at least not close to the extent that they are now. And Lo and Behold! The infections in the Northeast have diminished as dramatically as those in the Southwest have taken off (unlike the flights of the carrier of the same name).

But could that not be because the people in one part of the country are more and more outdoors, whereas those in the other are spending more of their time indoors? Well, that question, having never been asked by any one besides a rather sad little man posting on a rather pathetic blog that's read by, at most, a handful of readers, will never be answered. We will instead continue to be led by the nose by our malevolent Furor, clutching a Bible in one hand while grabbing a pussy with the other, and his profit-driven mass (hysteria) media doppelgagner, neither of whom, even in the thralls of a global plague, has evinced the slightest inclination of promoting anything but their own self-interest. 

But let's consider how A/C works, as expalined by a concise article at HVAC.com:

Here's how Air Conditioners draw heat energy from the house and move it outdoors:

• Warm air from inside the home is circulated across an evaporator, where the refrigerant absorbs heat from the air. At this point, the refrigerant transforms from cold liquid to hot vapor, allowing the warm air to become cooler.
• The refrigerant vapor moves to the compressor, within the home’s outdoor unit. The compressor compresses the refrigerant vapor, increasing pressure and temperature.
• The refrigerant then moves to the condenser, where it is condensed back to a liquid, allowing the heat to release, exiting the unit through the fins.
• Cooled, liquid refrigerant then cycles back into the home, where the expansion device regulates its flow back into the evaporator to repeat the cooling process.

This cooled air, much like the cooled air in meat-packing plants, is much more friendly to the Covid-19 virus than the hot air it has removed. So even if the A/C unit itself has no role in recirculating already Covid-laced air to other parts of your living space (an assumption I find hard to countenance) it most certainly creates an artificial environment that's far more hospitable to this specific microbe, allowing it to live longer and infect more people, than the environment it has replaced.

Given the attributes of the current surge in infections and the locations in which their growth rates are the most startlingly robust, it is hard for me to believe that its is not precisely the heat and the effects it has on people's behavior (ie seeking indoor spaces, where no one is wearing a mask, and where anyone who is infected is shedding their longer-lived viral particles into air that is then recirculated) is not instrumental in causing a resurgence in the nation's Covid-19 infection rate.