An environmental determinant of viral respiratory disease
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Abstract
The evident seasonality of influenza suggests a significant role for weather and climate as one of several determinants of viral respiratory disease (VRD), including social determinants which play a major role in shaping these phenomena. Based on the current mechanistic understanding of how VRDs are transmitted by small droplets, we identify an environmental variable, Air Drying Capacity (ADC), as an atmospheric state-variable with significant and direct relevance to the transmission of VRD. ADC dictates the evolution and fate of droplets under given temperature and humidity conditions. The definition of this variable is rooted in the Maxwell theory of droplet evolution via coupled heat and mass transfer between droplets and the surrounding environment. We present the climatology of ADC, and compare its observed distribution in space and time to the observed prevalence of influenza and COVID-19 from extensive global data sets. Globally, large ADC values appear to significantly constrain the observed transmission and spread of VRD, consistent with the significant coherency of the observed seasonal cycles of ADC and influenza. Our results introduce a new environmental determinant, rooted in the mechanism of VRD transmission, with potential implications for explaining seasonality of influenza, and for describing how environmental conditions may impact to some degree the evolution of similar VRDs, such as COVID-19.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.05.20123349: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Nevertheless, our results present some important caveats. First, indoor heating and cooling will substantially move ADC away from its outdoor value, which we considered in our analysis. Transmission can occur indoors where temperature can be very different from outdoor conditions. Typically, in mid-latitudes, wintertime ADC is much …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.05.20123349: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Nevertheless, our results present some important caveats. First, indoor heating and cooling will substantially move ADC away from its outdoor value, which we considered in our analysis. Transmission can occur indoors where temperature can be very different from outdoor conditions. Typically, in mid-latitudes, wintertime ADC is much higher inside than outside, and vice-versa during summer. Still, in regions where air conditioning and heating are available, conditions indoors should tend to exhibit much less seasonality than outdoors. In addition, the evident seasonality of influenza makes a strong case for the role of outdoor conditions, given that people spend much of their time indoors year-round36. The seasonality of VRDs may therefore primarily reflect outdoor ADC. Second, biological determinants of virus survival may be strongly correlated to ADC, meaning that part of the ADC-VRD prevalence relationship may be explained by the effect of environmental conditions on the virus itself, and not on the transmission pathway. In particular, temperature is thought to affect the survival of influenza viruses5, though we fail to find a coherent signal in global data (Fig. 3-b). Similarly, in the case of influenza and, possibly, COVID-19, UV radiation is believed to be severely detrimental to viruses.9 Low ADC is unmistakably associated with low incoming UV, but at higher levels the relationship becomes less clear (Fig. S7). Therefore, ADC and UV radiation may well interact and stren...
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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