Association between coronavirus cases and seasonal climatic variables in Mediterranean European Region, evidence by panel data regression

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic is one of the most fast-spreading diseases in the history, and the transmission of this virus has crossed rapidly over the whole world. In this study, we intend to detect the effect of temperature, precipitation, and wind speed on the Coronavirus infected cases throughout climate seasons for the whole year of epidemic starting from February 20, 2020 to February 19, 2021 with considering data patterns of each season separately; winter, spring, summer, autumn, in Mediterranean European regions, whereas those are located at the similar temperature zone in southern Europe. We apply the panel data approach by considering the developed robust estimation of clustered standard error which leads to achieving high forecasting accuracy. The main finding supports that temperature and wind speed have significant influence in reducing the Coronavirus cases at the beginning of this epidemic particularly in the first-winter, spring, and early summer, but they have very weak effects in the autumn and second-winter. Therefore, it is important to take into account the changes throughout seasons, and to consider other indirect factors which influence the virus transmission. This finding could lead to significant contributions to policymakers in European Union and European Commission Environment to limit the Coronavirus transmissions. As the Mediterranean region becomes more crowded for tourism purposes particularly in the summer season.