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Limited role for meteorological factors on the variability in COVID-19 incidence: A retrospective study of 102 Chinese cities.

ABSTRACT: While many studies have focused on identifying the association between meteorological factors and the activity of COVID-19, we argue that the contribution of meteorological factors to a reduction of the risk of COVID-19 was minimal when the effects of control measures were taken into account. In this study, we assessed how much variability in COVID-19 activity is attributable to city-level socio-demographic characteristics, meteorological factors, and the control measures imposed. We obtained the daily incidence of COVID-19, city-level characteristics, and meteorological data from a total of 102 cities situated in 27 provinces/municipalities outside Hubei province in China from 1 January 2020 to 8 March 2020, which largely covers almost the first wave of the epidemic. Generalized linear mixed effect models were employed to examine the variance in the incidence of COVID-19 explained by different combinations of variables. According to the results, including the control measure effects in a model substantially raised the explained variance to 45%, which increased by >40% compared to the null model that did not include any covariates. On top of that, including temperature and relative humidity in the model could only result in < 1% increase in the explained variance even though the meteorological factors showed a statistically significant association with the incidence rate of COVID-19. In conclusion, we showed that very limited variability of the COVID-19 incidence was attributable to meteorological factors. Instead, the control measures could explain a larger proportion of variance.

SUBMITTER: Chong KC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7904227 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Limited role for meteorological factors on the variability in COVID-19 incidence: A retrospective study of 102 Chinese cities.

Chong Ka Chun KC Ran Jinjun J Lau Steven Yuk Fai SYF Goggins William Bernard WB Zhao Shi S Wang Pin P Tian Linwei L Wang Maggie Haitian MH Mohammad Kirran N KN Wei Lai L Xiong Xi X Liu Hengyan H Chan Paul Kay Sheung PKS Wang Huwen H Wang Yawen Y Wang Jingxuan J

PLoS neglected tropical diseases 20210224 2

While many studies have focused on identifying the association between meteorological factors and the activity of COVID-19, we argue that the contribution of meteorological factors to a reduction of the risk of COVID-19 was minimal when the effects of control measures were taken into account. In this study, we assessed how much variability in COVID-19 activity is attributable to city-level socio-demographic characteristics, meteorological factors, and the control measures imposed. We obtained th ...[more]

PMID: 33626051

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Project description:BackgroundBefore effective vaccines become widely available, sufficient understanding of the impacts of climate, human movement and non-pharmaceutical interventions on the transmissibility of COVID-19 is needed but still lacking.MethodsWe collected by crowdsourcing a database of 11 003 COVID-19 cases from 305 cities outside Hubei Province from December 31, 2019 to April 27, 2020. We estimated the daily effective reproduction numbers (Rt ) of COVID-19 in 41 cities where the crowdsourced case data are comparable to the official surveillance data. The impacts of meteorological variables, human movement indices and nonpharmaceutical emergency responses on Rt were evaluated with generalized estimation equation models.FindingsThe median Rt was 0•46 (IQR: 0•37-0•87) in the northern cities, higher than 0•20 (IQR: 0•09-0•52) in the southern cities (p=0•004). A higher local transmissibility of COVID-19 was associated with a low temperature, a relative humidity near 70-75%, and higher intracity and intercity human movement. An increase in temperature from 0℃ to 20℃ would reduce Rt by 30% (95 CI 10-46%). A further increase to 30℃ would result in another 17% (95% CI 5-27%) reduction. An increase in relative humidity from 40% to 75% would raise the transmissibility by 47% (95% CI 9-97%), but a further increase to 90% would reduce the transmissibility by 12% (95% CI 4-19%). The decrease in intracity human movement as a part of the highest-level emergency response in China reduced the transmissibility by 36% (95% CI 27-44%), compared to 5% (95% CI 1-9%) for restricting intercity transport. Other nonpharmaceutical interventions further reduced Rt by 39% (95% CI 31-47%).InterpretationClimate can affect the transmission of COVID-19 where effective interventions are implemented. Restrictions on intracity human movement may be needed in places where other nonpharmaceutical interventions are unable to mitigate local transmission.FundingChina Mega-Project on Infectious Disease Prevention; U.S. National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

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Limited role for meteorological factors on the variability in COVID-19 incidence: A retrospective study of 102 Chinese cities.

Publications

Limited role for meteorological factors on the variability in COVID-19 incidence: A retrospective study of 102 Chinese cities.

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