TY - JOUR
T1 - Climatic signatures in the different COVID-19 pandemic waves across both hemispheres
AU - Fontal, Alejandro
AU - Bouma, Menno J.
AU - San-José, Adrià
AU - López, Leonardo
AU - Pascual, Mercedes
AU - Rodó, Xavier
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge the support of A. Navarro in the development of the SDC apps. A.F. acknowledges financial support from HELICAL as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 81354. X.R. acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the ‘Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2019 2023’ program (CEX2018 000806S) and support from the Generalitat de Catalunya through the CERCA program. A.S.J. was supported by a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, Spain (ID 100010434, fellowship code LCF/BQ/DR19/11740017).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - The roles of climate and true seasonal signatures in the epidemiology of emergent pathogens, and that of SARS-CoV-2 in particular, remain poorly understood. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show, for COVID-19 cases, strong consistent negative effects of both temperature and absolute humidity at large spatial scales. At finer spatial resolutions, we substantiate these connections during the seasonal rise and fall of COVID-19. Strong disease responses are identified in the first two waves, suggesting clear ranges for temperature and absolute humidity that are similar to those formerly described for seasonal influenza. For COVID-19, in all studied regions and pandemic waves, a process-based model that incorporates a temperature-dependent transmission rate outperforms baseline formulations with no driver or a sinusoidal seasonality. Our results, so far, classify COVID-19 as a seasonal low-temperature infection and suggest an important contribution of the airborne pathway in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with implications for the control measures we discuss.
AB - The roles of climate and true seasonal signatures in the epidemiology of emergent pathogens, and that of SARS-CoV-2 in particular, remain poorly understood. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show, for COVID-19 cases, strong consistent negative effects of both temperature and absolute humidity at large spatial scales. At finer spatial resolutions, we substantiate these connections during the seasonal rise and fall of COVID-19. Strong disease responses are identified in the first two waves, suggesting clear ranges for temperature and absolute humidity that are similar to those formerly described for seasonal influenza. For COVID-19, in all studied regions and pandemic waves, a process-based model that incorporates a temperature-dependent transmission rate outperforms baseline formulations with no driver or a sinusoidal seasonality. Our results, so far, classify COVID-19 as a seasonal low-temperature infection and suggest an important contribution of the airborne pathway in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with implications for the control measures we discuss.
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U2 - 10.1038/s43588-021-00136-6
DO - 10.1038/s43588-021-00136-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85121745858
SN - 2662-8457
VL - 1
SP - 655
EP - 665
JO - Nature Computational Science
JF - Nature Computational Science
IS - 10
ER -