A Retrospective Analysis of Influence of Environmental/Air Temperature and Relative Humidity on SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak

Abstract

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses causing mild to severe upper respiratory tract syndrome. Recent pandemic threat caused by SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Whether the COVID-19 might be affected by warming global temperatures like some of previous pandemic flues. Therefore, the current study aims to analyze the effect of temperature and relative humidity (RH) on the spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 infection. The confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 31 different provinces in China and 274 provinces and/or countries were obtained from an online database. The real time temperature and humidity of the respective regions were taken from another online weather reporting data source. Spearman [R(s)] rank correlation was performed to identify the relationship between the variables (e.g., temperature, number of confirmed cases etc.). The overall spreading of SARS-CoV-2 in relations to temperature was inversely correlated. Among 29 of 31 provinces of China the overall correlation coeffient of the relationship between temperature and viral spread was negative [-R(s)] where in 15 provinces the correlation was at significant level (p<0.05). Furthermore, there was a significant negative relationship observed between the SARS-CoV-2 spreading and air temperature throughout the 274 provinces and/or countries of the world. However, there was no significant corelationship between humidity and COVID-19 spreading either in China or among countries and/or various regions of the world. The SARS-CoV-2 infection seems to be spread in a wide range of temperature throughout the world. Thus, several factors including temperature, may influnce the SARS-CoV-2 spreading. As a results, relatively elevated air temperature could not completely prevent viral spread but it might be one of the important detrimental factors for SARS-CoV-2 rapid spread.