Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand, while the relationship between weather conditions and the spread of the virus remains largely debatable. In this paper, we attempt to examine this question by employing a flexible econometric model coupled with fine-scaled hourly temperature variations and a rich set of covariates for 291 cities in the Chinese mainland. More importantly, we combine the baseline estimates with climate-change projections from 21 global climate models to understand the pandemic in different scenarios. We found a significant negative relationship between temperatures and caseload. A one-hour increase in temperatures from 25 °C to 28 °C tends to reduce daily cases by 15.1%, relative to such an increase from −2 °C to 1 °C. Our results also suggest an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between relative humidity and confirmed cases. Despite the negative effects of heat, we found that rising temperatures induced by climate change are unlikely to contain a hypothesized pandemic in the future. In contrast, cases would tend to increase by 10.9% from 2040 to 2059 with a representative concentration pathway (RCP) of 4.5 and by 7.5% at an RCP of 8.5, relative to 2020, though reductions of 1.8% and 18.9% were projected for 2080–2099 for the same RCPs, respectively. These findings raise concerns that the pandemic could worsen under the climate-change framework.
Highlights
The world has been badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 42.7 million confirmed cases and over 1.1 million deaths as of October 25, 2020 (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center 2020), and the number of cases is still growing
As we aimed to identify the relationship between weather conditions and the spread of the virus, migrations from Wuhan could have been a major threat to our identification
A similar linear relationship was found in studies on temperature bins and suicide rates (Burke et al 2018) and cognitive performance (Zivin et al 2020)
Summary
The world has been badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 42.7 million confirmed cases and over 1.1 million deaths as of October 25, 2020 (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center 2020), and the number of cases is still growing. Numerous mitigation efforts have proven to be effective at curbing the transmission of the virus, such as travel restrictions, early identification, isolation of cases, etc (Hellewell et al 2020, Lai et al2020, Prem et al 2020, Tian et al 2020). The role of weather conditions (temperature and humidity) amid the ongoing pandemic remains unclear, yet has gained enormous attention. Existing results on this topic are mixed, in terms of the limited lab experiments and in fast-growing empirical studies. From the lab-experiment perspective, Chin et al (2020) found that the virus was highly stable at 4 ◦C, but sensitive to heat. Omer et al (2020) claimed that infectivity lasts for a shorter time at temperatures greater than
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