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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 We prospectively defined "warm" and "cold" climate countries according to the following criteria: A "Cold" climate country was defined as a country with average temperatures below 15˚ Celsius degrees (<77˚ Fahrenheit) during the month of March 10 and latitude line north of 40˚. A "Warm" climate country was defined as a country with average March temperatures above 15˚ Celsius degrees (≥77˚ Fahrenheit). Based on the assumption that Italy has experienced an unproportionally high local disease spread not essentially affected by weather (in a similar manner to the Wuhan outbreak) we tested our model with and without the addition of Italy. We did not include China in our analysis given the unique circumstances associated with the country being the origin of the outbreak, the lag between outbreak and detection that may confound spread as well as the drastic mitigation steps applied. We assessed disease spread by two author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.