COVID-19 transmission in Mainland China is associated with temperature and humidity: a time-series analysis

Abstract

COVID-19 has become a pandemic. The influence of meteorological factors on the transmission and spread of COVID-19 if of interest. This study sought to examine the associations of daily average temperature (AT) and relative humidity (ARH) with the daily count of COVID-19 cases in 30 Chinese provinces (in Hubei fromAdditive Model (GAM) was fitted to quantify the province-specific associations between meteorological variables and the daily cases of COVID-19 during the study periods. In the model, the 14-day exponential moving averages (EMAs) of AT and ARH, and their interaction were included with time trend and health-seeking behavior adjusted. Their spatial distributions were visualized. AT and ARH showed significantly negative associations with COVID-19 with a significant interaction between them (0.04, 95% confidence interval: 0.004-0.07) in Hubei. Every 1°C increase in the AT led to a decrease in the daily confirmed cases by 36% to 57% when ARH was in the range from 67% to 85.5%. Every 1% increase in ARH led to a decrease in the daily confirmed cases by 11% to 22% when AT was in the range from 5.04°C to 8.2°C. However, these associations were not consistent throughout Mainland China.

Climate indicators and COVID-19 recovery: A case of Wuhan city during the lockdown

“…[ between an increase in humidity and daily additional COVID-19 infections (Qi et al, 2020). The QQ results of this study show that an increase in humidity does play a significant role in increasing COVID-19 recoveries, consistent with the findings of the earlier studies.…”

Eco-epidemiological assessment of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, January–February 2020

“…Several other recent studies have addressed the relationship between weather and COVID-19 transmission. One study looked at average temperature and relative humidity, but only measured at a provincial level, did not consider solar radiation and rainfall, and did not reach clear public health conclusions [8]. Another study related reproductive numbers in Chinese cities to temperature and humidity and extrapolated those findings worldwide [9].…”

Impact of meteorology and air pollution on Covid-19 pandemic transmission in Lombardy region, Northern Italy

“…Several studies were recently investigating the contribution of meteorological conditions on Covid-19 transmission around the world. As shown in Pani et al, 2020 studies from China (Shi et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020b;Xie and Zhu, 2020;Ma et al, 2020;Qi et al, 2020), Iran (Ahmadi et al, 2020), Spain (Briz-Redón and Serrano-Aroca, 2020), the USA (Bashir et al, 2020;Gupta et al, 2020), Mexico (Méndez Arriaga, 2020), Turkey (Sahin, 2020), Brazil (Auler et al, 2020;Prata et al, 2020), Indonesia (Tosepu et al, 2020), Norway (Menebo, 2020) and also over the globe (Sobral et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2020a) are controversial and the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted that new investigations are needed to quantitatively assess how the weather in uence the virus spreading. On this topic, Pani et al (2020) results found that water vapor temperature, dew point, absolute and relative humidity show positive signi cant correlation with SARS CoV-19 transmission in Singapore, one of the biggest densely-populated megacities in South-East Asia.…”

“…More information about data and data reliability can be found in Pani et al (2020). Besides those variables, following Pani et al (2020) methodology, we retrieved also the absolute humidity (AH, in g m -3 ) through Clausius-Clapeyron equation (Qi et al, 2020;Gupta et al, 2020;Pani et al, 2020) where RH represents the relative humidity and T the temperature. Following Ou-Yang et al 2014and Pani et al (2020), the water vapor (WV, in g kg -1 ) is estimated:…”