Transmission rate and control efficiency of COVID-19 was lower in warm and wet climate

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has caused huge damage to public health around the world, revealing the influencing factors are essential to take effective control. By using a global dataset covering 617 time series over the world, we estimated the transmission parameters and modeled human and climate effects on COVID-19 transmission. We found that the average transmission rate was lower in warm climate over the world and in wet climate (more precipitation) in Europe. The maximum transmission rate was lower in warm climate in the world, China and USA, and in wet climate in China. The control efficiency in the world, China, and USA was lower in warm and wet condition. In general, our results indicate that warm and wet climate do not favor transmission and human intervention of COVID-19, and COVID-19 transmission rate would be lower in warm and wet seasons or regions than in dry and cold ones.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• transmission ability
• control efficiency
• temperature
• precipitation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Chinese provincial and prefectural health commission, the World Health Organization, and Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University for providing cumulative cases data of COVID-19.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Authors’ contributions

ZZ designed the study and XW and CC collected the data. XW performed the data analysis and ZZ and XW wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed intellectually to the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The dataset supporting the conclusions of this study from Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) (https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6) is included as a supplementary file.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09603123.2022.2160433

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China [2021YFC0863400]; project of studying transmissions of COVID-19, the key program of Chinese Academy of Sciences [KJZD-SW-L11]; ANSO Project of Chinese Academy of Science [ANSO-CR-KP-2020-08]; the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST and ISZS [2021QNRC001, ISZS-YESS Program]; risk assessments based on big data analysis supported by the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [E0517111].