The Seasonal End of Human Coronavirus Hospital Admissions with Implications for SARS-CoV-2

  1. Alan T. Evangelista

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Abstract

The seasonality of influenza viruses and endemic human coronaviruses was tracked over an 8-year period to assess key epidemiologic reduction points in disease incidence for an urban area in the northeast United States. Patients admitted to a pediatric hospital with worsening respiratory symptoms were tested using a multiplex PCR assay from nasopharyngeal swabs. The additive seasonal effects of outdoor temperatures and indoor relative humidity (RH) were evaluated. The 8-year average peak activity of human coronaviruses occurred in the first week of January, when droplet and contact transmission was enabled by the low indoor RH of 20–30%. Previous studies have shown that an increase in RH to 50% has been associated with markedly reduced viability and transmission of influenza virus and animal coronaviruses. As disease incidence was reduced by 50% in early March, to 75% in early April, to greater than 99% at the end of April, a relationship was observed from colder temperatures in January with a low indoor RH to a gradual increase in outdoor temperatures in April with an indoor RH of 45–50%. As a lipid-bound, enveloped virus with similar size characteristics to endemic human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 should be subject to the same dynamics of reduced viability and transmission with increased humidity. In addition to the major role of social distancing, the transition from lower to higher indoor RH with increasing outdoor temperatures could have an additive effect on the decrease in SARS-CoV-2 cases in May. Over the 8-year period of this study, human coronavirus activity was either zero or > 99% reduction in the months of June through September, and the implication would be that SARS-Cov-2 may follow a similar pattern.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.15.20103416: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The use of aggregated patient viral incidence data in this study was reviewed and considered to be exempt from human subjects’ ethics review by the Institutional Review Board of Drexel University College of Medicine.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    A limitation of this study was that the percent incidence of seasonal coronavirus infection was based on pediatric hospital admissions. However, hospital admissions are representative of a smaller percentage of infections that are present in the community. As a novel virus, SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious than human coronaviruses, and may persist at very low levels in small local clusters from June through September, unrelated to environmental conditions.

    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.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.15.20103416v1 on medRxiv