Climate effect on COVID-19 spread rate: an online surveillance tool

Gil Caspi; Uri Shalit; Soren Lund Kristensen; Doron Aronson; Lilac Caspi; Oran Rossenberg; Avi Shina; Oren Caspi

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.26.20044727 doi: medRxiv preprint historical average temperatures. Further research and update of the surveillance tool will allow tracing these dynamic trends in relation with real-time temperature and the appropriate time lag consistent with COVID-19 incubation period. Finally, our results might further be confounded by the varied socioeconomic status of the participating countries as well as social context. COVID-19 RR and RoS are affected by a multitude of factors. As the pandemic is spreading across the world with an alarmingly increasing toll of diagnosed cases as well as deaths, our findings of decreased RR and RoS in warm climates may suggest that the inevitable seasonal variance will alter the dynamic of the disease spread in both hemispheres in the coming months. However, we warrant a cautious interpretation of these findings given the fact that we are in the initial steps of this outbreak in many "warm" climate countries, the high variance of the data and the dynamic changes in the disease surveillance and the lack of correlation based on the limited data in the US. The current evidence from our study, does not justify any modification of governmental mitigation strategies in countries with warm climates. We hope that the online tool coupling COVID-19 data with climate data will assist in tracking the disease and tailoring the needed measures to contain it. author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.