Exponential phase of covid19 expansion is not driven by climate at global scale

Marco Tulio Pacheco Coelho; Joao Fabricio Mota Rodrigues; Anderson Matos Medina; Paulo Scalco; Levi Carina Terribile; Bruno Vilela; Jose Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho; Ricardo Dobrovolski

The models used to estimate COVID-19 growth rate on different countries showed an average R 2 of 0.96 (SD = 0.03), varying from 0.83 to 0.99, indicating an overall excellent performance on estimating growth rates. Only one out of the 44 countries (i.e., exponential growth phase for at least ten days after country had 100 confirmed cases) did not show an R 2 > 0.8 for model fitting, and, therefore, we removed this country from the following analysis. The geographical patterns in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases do not show a clear trend, at least in terms of latitudinal variation, that would suggest a climatic effect at macroecological scale ( Fig. 2A) . We build one model including only climate and socioeconomic variables, which explained only 19% of the variation on growth rates with a significant (p < 0.025) and negative coefficient for annual population growth rate. This model did not have spatial autocorrelation in the residuals. When we added country centrality (i.e. country importance in global transportation network) as a predictor, the R 2 increased to 34.5%.