Global COVID-19 transmission rate is influenced by precipitation seasonality and the speed of climate temperature warming
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Abstract
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a rapidly spreading worldwide epidemic; thus, it is a global priority to reduce the speed of the epidemic spreading. Several studies predicted that high temperature and humidity could reduce COVID-19 transmission. However, exceptions exist to this observation, further thorough examinations are thus needed for their confirmation. In this study, therefore, we used a global dataset of COVID-19 cases and global climate databases and comprehensively investigated how climate parameters could contribute to the growth rate of COVID-19 cases while statistically controlling for potential confounding effects using spatial analysis. We also confirmed that the growth rate decreased with the temperature; however, the growth rate was affected by precipitation seasonality and warming velocity rather than temperature. In particular, a lower growth rate was observed for a higher precipitation seasonality and lower warming velocity. These effects were independent of population density, human life quality, and travel restrictions. The results indicate that the temperature effect is less important compared to these intrinsic climate characteristics, which might thus be useful for explaining the exceptions. However, the contributions of the climate parameters to the growth rate were moderate; rather, the contribution of travel restrictions in each country was more significant. Although our findings are preliminary owing to data-analysis limitations, they may be helpful when predicting COVID-19 transmission.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.10.20060459: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources In order to evaluate the historical climate change, we computed warming velocity (WV) [27, 28], defined as the temporal annual mean temperature (AMT) gradient divided by the spatial AMT gradient, where the temporal gradient is defined as the difference between the current and past AMT, available in the WorldClim database, and the spatial gradient was the local slope of the current climate surface at the observation area, calculated using the function terrain (with the option neighbors = 4) in the R package raster (version 2.9.5). 2.4. WorldClimsuggested: (WorldClim, RRID:SCR_010244)To … SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.10.20060459: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources In order to evaluate the historical climate change, we computed warming velocity (WV) [27, 28], defined as the temporal annual mean temperature (AMT) gradient divided by the spatial AMT gradient, where the temporal gradient is defined as the difference between the current and past AMT, available in the WorldClim database, and the spatial gradient was the local slope of the current climate surface at the observation area, calculated using the function terrain (with the option neighbors = 4) in the R package raster (version 2.9.5). 2.4. WorldClimsuggested: (WorldClim, RRID:SCR_010244)To evaluate the effect of travel restrictions, we manually extracted the dates when travel restrictions were imposed in each country from the Wikipedia page “Travel restrictions related to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic”[32]. Wikipediasuggested: (Wikipedia, RRID:SCR_004897)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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