Abstract
Weather and climate play a significant role in infectious disease transmission, through changes to transmission dynamics, host susceptibility and virus survival in the environment. Exploring the association of weather variables and COVID-19 transmission is vital in understanding the potential for seasonality and future outbreaks and developing early warning systems. Previous research examined the effects of weather on COVID-19, but the findings appeared inconsistent. This review aims to summarize the currently available literature on the association between weather and COVID-19 incidence and provide possible suggestions for developing weather-based early warning system for COVID-19 transmission. Studies eligible for inclusion used ecological methods to evaluate associations between weather (i.e., temperature, humidity, wind speed and rainfall) and COVID-19 transmission. The review showed that temperature was reported as significant in the greatest number of studies, with COVID-19 incidence increasing as temperature decreased and the highest incidence reported in the temperature range of 0–17 °C. Humidity was also significantly associated with COVID-19 incidence, though the reported results were mixed, with studies reporting positive and negative correlation. A significant interaction between humidity and temperature was also reported. Wind speed and rainfall results were not consistent across studies. Weather variables including temperature and humidity can contribute to increased transmission of COVID-19, particularly in winter conditions through increased host susceptibility and viability of the virus. While there is less indication of an association with wind speed and rainfall, these may contribute to behavioral changes that decrease exposure and risk of infection. Understanding the implications of associations with weather variables and seasonal variations for monitoring and control of future outbreaks is essential for early warning systems.
Highlights
In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted to cases of atypical pneumonia with unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.The disease, termed COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) spread by human-to-human transmission from China throughout Asia and into Europe, North America, South America and Oceania and declared a pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020 [1,2]
The majority of studies analyzed in this review reported significant associations between weather variables and COVID-19 cases, temperature and humidity, suggesting that weather and climate play a role in transmission dynamics
The studies assessed in this review suggest that ambient or environmental temperature is the most consistently significant weather variable associated with COVID-19 incidence, 90% of the assessed studies reported a strongly significant or significant association with new daily cases of COVID-19, with one study reporting daily cases decreased by 13.53%
Summary
In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted to cases of atypical pneumonia with unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.The disease, termed COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) spread by human-to-human transmission from China throughout Asia and into Europe, North America, South America and Oceania and declared a pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020 [1,2]. In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted to cases of atypical pneumonia with unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. 16 December 2020, over 74.7 million cases have been confirmed in 214 countries and territories, with over 1.65 million deaths recorded as a result of COVID-19 [3].The three most affected countries account for 45.7% of all cases globally and include the US, with 23% of all cases (n = 17,163,944), India with 13.3% of cases (n = 9,956,557) and Brazil with 9.4% of all cases (n = 7,040,608) and 38.5% of total global deaths from the US (18.7% n = 310,095), Brazil (11.1% n = 183,735) and India (8.7% n = 144,451) (Figure 1).
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