Abstract
The role of environmental factors in the transmission of COVID-19 still needs to be determined. The main objective of the present study is to explore the relationship between environmental factors (both meteorological and air pollution parameters) and the daily confirmed COVID-19 cases over Delhi, India. This study employed a secondary data analysis of COVID-19 (from 1 March to 30 June, 2020) from the Delhi State Health Bulletin and the environmental factors from the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) of India. Pearson's correlation coefficients were assessed to show the correlation between environmental factors and daily confirmed COVID-19 cases. The temperature (maximum, minimum, average, and dew point) and wind speed exhibited a significant positive correlation with daily COVID-19 cases. However, diurnal temperature range, rainfall, and relative humidity showed non-significant correlations. Air pollutants were found to be weakly associated with daily COVID-19 cases. However, O3 exhibited a significant positive correlation with daily COVID-19 cases in Delhi. The probability distribution analysis reveals that approximately 80% of the total confirmed cases were registered when the average temperature was higher than 30°C. The present study finds a prominent relationship between different environmental factors and COVID-19 transmission in Delhi. However, further detailed analysis over different parts of entire India is required to get a complete picture and solid conclusion.
Highlights
The world is presently going through a very distressing stage with the spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Over Delhi, the first confirmed COVID-19 case was reported on 2 March, 2020 and first death due to the COVID-19 was reported on 14 March, 2020
A total of 437 deaths was reported on 17 June, 2020; the data for this particular day is removed from the database as an outlier while doing the correlation analyses
Summary
The world is presently going through a very distressing stage with the spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This is highly contagious and has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a pandemic after the reporting of 118319 confirmed cases and 4292 deaths worldwide (WHO, 2020a). Several studies claimed that weather conditions could influence the growth, viability, range of spread, and transmission of COVID-19 causing viruses (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990; Chan et al, 2011; Van Doremalen et al, 2013; Chen et al, 2020).
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