Covid-19 outbreak associated with demographic-meteorological factors in the arid and semi-arid region Iran: case study Gonabad city, 2020-2021

ABSTRACT

Since the (Covid-19) pandemic outbreak, questioning regarding climate and incident of Covid-19 infection rates has been debated, while there is no clear research evidence until now in Iran. This study has focused on investigating the association between Covid-19 cases and demographic –meteorological factors in arid and semi-arid zones of Iran (from March 1, 2020, to January 31, 2022) by analyzing with Via Poisson and negative binomial regression. As a result, the incidence rate of both Covid-19 hospitalization and mortality cases reached peaks in the summer followed by the autumn. Interestingly, Covid-19 hospitalization cases are associated with humidity, temperature, and wind factors seasonally and monthly, but mortality cases are just associated with wind. In conclusion, the result demonstrated that demographicand meteorological factorsare positively and negatively associated with Covid-19 cases. Therefore, identifying the environmental factors contributing to the excess Covid-19 can help to prevent future pandemic waves in Iranian arid and semi-arid zone.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19 pandemic
• Demographic-meteorological factors
• Arid and semi-arid region
• Iran

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All of the data are available in Gonabad university of Medical Science

Ethics approval

Ethics approval is not needed as the study uses publicly available country-level (aggregated) morbidity, mortality, and weather data.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09603123.2022.2125161

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Social Determinants Health Research Center, Gonabad University of Medical Sciences, Gonabad, Iran (Grant number: 199).