Abstract
Purpose: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a serious public health problem worldwide. This study sought to examine the associations of daily average temperature (AT) and relative humidity (ARH) with the percent increase in COVID-19 cases. Methods: Daily confirmed cases and meteorological factors in 38 districts of India were collected between 1st April 2020 to 30th April 2020. Taking a 5-day time lag of average values of the variables and multiple days-samples, we ran multiple models and performed appropriate hypothesis tests to decide the single preferred model for each sample data. Suitable fixed effects (FE) and random effects (RE) models with cluster-robust standard errors were applied to quantify the district-specific associations of meteorological and other variables with COVID-19 cases. Results: All FE models revealed that every one-degree rise in AT led to a decrease in 3.909 points (on average) in percent increase in COVID-19 cases. All RE models showed that with one unit increase in the malaria annual parasite index, there was a significant increase in 10.835 points (on average) in percent increase in COVID-19 cases. In both FE and RE models, ARH was found to be negatively associated with a percent increase in COVID-19 cases, although in half of these models the association was statistically insignificant. Conclusion: Our results indicate that mean temperature, mean relative humidity, and malaria endemicity might have an essential role in the stability and transmissibility of the 2019 novel coronavirus.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by the new coronavirus called 2019-nCoV that was first identified in Wuhan city of China (Chen et al 2020; Ghinai et al 2020)
Our results indicate that mean temperature, mean relative humidity, and malaria endemicity might have an essential role in the stability and transmissibility of the 2019 novel coronavirus
This is the first study in India in which we sought to explore the effect of environmental temperature and humidity on the spread of this novel coronavirus
Summary
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by the new coronavirus called 2019-nCoV that was first identified in Wuhan city of China (Chen et al 2020; Ghinai et al 2020). Various studies have pointed to the role of climatic conditions like ambient temperature and humidity on the transmission and survival of 2019-nCoV (Gupta 2020; Harmooshi et al 2020; Wang et al 2020; Xie and Zhu 2020). To our knowledge, this is the first study in India in which we sought to explore the effect of environmental temperature and humidity on the spread of this novel coronavirus. We assessed the effect of other covariates like daily average air pressure, daily average wind speed, latitude, longitude, BCG vaccination rate, Polio vaccination rate, and malaria endemicity on the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus
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