“…Future work could also focus on employing the dynamic transmission rate to forecast any trends in the numbers of COVID-19 cases, or to model patterns in future epidemics. Further, spatiotemporal disease characteristics (including the composite space-time disease dependencies and spread patterns using modern geostatistics methods, and their inter-association or tele-connection with climatic factors using time series, time-frequency methods ( Christakos and Olea, 2005 ; Christakos et al, 2005 ; Chirstakos, 2017 ; He et al, 2017 , He et al, 2018a , He et al, 2018b , He et al, 2019a , He et al, 2019b , He et al, 2019c ; Xiao et al, 2019 ; Jahangiri et al, 2020 ; Qi et al, 2020 ; Shi et al, 2020 ) could be explored by considering various levels of data, such as county-level or even individual-level disease data. More specifically, as was documented in the above literature, the geostatistics methods can help detect the trends, spread directions and core areas of the infectious disease.…”