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 spread of SARS-CoV-2 from central China to other locations might be strongly associated with inter-country connections, which might largely surpass the effect of climate suitability. Thus, at this point of the pandemic, there is still a distributional disequilibrium that can generate very biased predictions based on climatic correlative modeling (De Marco et al. 2008) . Thus, here we used an alternative macroecological approach (e.g., Burnside et al. 2012) to investigate variations on the growth rates of SARS-CoV-2, based on the geographical patterns of exponential growth rates of the disease at country level. We studied the effect of environment, socioeconomic and global transportation controlling for spatial autocorrelation that could bias model significance. By analyzing these factors, we show that the exponential growth of COVID-19 is not driven by climatic and socioeconomical variables at global scale and is explained mainly by country's importance in global transportation network (i.e., air transportation).