Interaction of temperature and relative humidity for growth of COVID-19 cases and death rates

Abstract

Akin to respiratory tract infection diseases, climatic conditions may significantly influence the COVID-19 epidemic. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant efforts have been made to explore the relationship between climatic condition and growth in number of COVID-19 cases. Contentious findings of either positive, negative, or no association with climatic conditions have been reported in many studies based on some early data on COVID-19 cases over a shorter time span. We integrate COVID-19 datasets with long meteorological time series of 29 countries to explore cross-country variation in COVID-19 cases and death rates with respect to temperature and relative humidity. Our empirical study reveals that temperature and relative humidity jointly influence the growth of COVID-19 cases and death rates. We generate predictive scenarios for changes in daily cases and death rates under different combinations of temperature and relative humidity. Low temperature with low humidity in a temperate climate and high temperature with high humidity in a hot and humid climate are found to surge the growth of COVID-19 cases and death rates. These relationships and our predictive scenarios can be applied to generate early warning for any future outbreak to adopt stringency policies, kick-start economic activities, prepare healthcare service plans, and target vaccination coverage.

Deep neural network for monitoring the growth of COVID-19 epidemic using meteorological covariates

“…Thus both temperature and humidity seem to play important roles in the regulation of COVID-19 growth. Not only the individual effect of temperature and relative humidity, but also their joint effects are found significant mimicking the existence of nonlinear relationship between growth of COVID-19 epidemic and meteorological covariates ( Khan, Abedin, Khan, et al, 2022 , Biryukov et al, 2020 ). Though lower degree associations with some other climatic factors such as air drying capacity, wind speed, and precipitation are explored, government intervention is found to be more important for suppression of transmission ( Sera et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Though public compliance and behavioral responses to stringent policies regulate the transmission of virus, droplets and surface transmissions can be regulated by the environmental factors such as temperature and relative humidity ( Biryukov et al, 2020 , Xie & Zhu, 2020 ). Thus the growth of COVID-19 epidemic can be regulated by any human intervention that reduces human-to-human contact and by natural phenomena through a complex interaction of meteorological covariates ( Khan, Abedin, Khan, et al, 2022 , Biryukov et al, 2020 , Bashir et al, 2020 ). This study explores the interactions of temperature and relative humidity for the prediction of growth of COVID-19 epidemic and utilizes this prediction for monitoring the progress towards the planned control.…”

Epidemic threshold of a COVID-19 model with gaussian white noise and semi-Markov switching

“…External factors (such as temperature, humidity, and available resources) may cause the spread of COVID-19 to accelerate or slow down and switch between two or more regimes [11] , [12] , [13] . Therefore, in this article, we suppose that the transmission rate in model (2.2) is driven by the semi-Markov process and the Gaussian white noise.…”

“…The results of Khan et al. [13] showed that temperature and relative humidity together affect the propagation of COVID-19. Alqudah et al.…”

Effects of corruption and income inequality on the reported number of COVID-19 cases and deaths: Evidence from a time series cross-sectional data analysis

“…by making time invariant factors (corruption, population density, etc.) insignificant [21,22]. Consequently, sprouting different variants of SARS-CoV-2 (Delta, Alpha, and Omicron) over time is infusing more heterogeneity in data.…”