Abstract
Assessing the impact of temperature on COVID-19 epidemiology is critical for implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions. However, few studies have accounted for the nature of contagious diseases, i.e., their dependent happenings. We aimed to quantify the impact of temperature on the transmissibility and virulence of COVID-19 in Tokyo, Japan, employing two epidemiological measurements of transmissibility and severity: the effective reproduction number (R_{t}) and case fatality risk (CFR). We estimated the R_{t} and time-delay adjusted CFR and to subsequently assess the nonlinear and delayed effect of temperature on R_{t} and time-delay adjusted CFR. For R_{t} at low temperatures, the cumulative relative risk (RR) at the first temperature percentile (3.3 °C) was 1.3 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.1–1.7). As for the virulence to humans, moderate cold temperatures were associated with higher CFR, and CFR also increased as the temperature rose. The cumulative RR at the 10th and 99th percentiles of temperature (5.8 °C and 30.8 °C) for CFR were 3.5 (95% CI: 1.3–10.0) and 6.4 (95% CI: 4.1–10.1). Our results suggest the importance to take precautions to avoid infection in both cold and warm seasons to avoid severe cases of COVID-19. The results and our proposed approach will also help in assessing the possible seasonal course of COVID-19 in the future.
Highlights
Assessing the impact of temperature on COVID-19 epidemiology is critical for implementing nonpharmaceutical interventions
A better understanding of the factors affecting the COVID-19 epidemic is critical to the design of tailored public health and social measures (PHSMs), e.g., travel restrictions, school closures, cancellation of public events and gatherings, etc. and much attention has been given to the impact of meteorological factors on the COVID-19 transmissibility and severity
Some of these investigated the possibility that the transmissibility is associated with temperature, where the transmissibility is often translated into the number of positive c ases[7,10,11,14]; these studies did not fully account for the transmission dynamics influenced by PHSMs of various intensities
Summary
Assessing the impact of temperature on COVID-19 epidemiology is critical for implementing nonpharmaceutical interventions. Simiao et al investigated that 1° increase in absolute latitude is associated with a 4.3% increase in COVID-19 cases per million inhabitants which is consistent with the hypothesis that high temperature and UV radiation can contribute to the reduction in t ransmission[11] Some of these investigated the possibility that the transmissibility is associated with temperature, where the transmissibility is often translated into the number of positive c ases[7,10,11,14]; these studies did not fully account for the transmission dynamics influenced by PHSMs of various intensities. In the literature as another study indicated higher temperatures are not significantly associated with a reduction in total cases or effective reproduction number of COVID-19 in C anada[16]
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