Is the spread of COVID-19 across countries influenced by environmental, economic and social factors?

Mohammad Alamgir Hossain

On 12 January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that a novel Coronavirus is infecting clusters of people in Wuhan, China from December, 2019 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. Fluctuations in the trends of daily new cases are probably highly influenced by governments' interventions. China reached its peak on 13 February 2020 with 15141 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. The biological and transmission mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 are not well-known yet 8 and under extensive investigation by researchers throughout the world. A very recent study claims that high temperature and high relative humidity reduce reproductive number, R0 of Coronavirus significantly and consequently lessen the transmission of the disease 9 . Human-to-human transmission of SARS Coronavirus is likely to be . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. According to Guo et al (2020) human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurs mainly through a close contact with patients of COVID-19 or incubation carriers. In a groundbreaking work, published on 30 January 2020, Riou and Althaus (2020) apprehended that the spread of the novel virus will depend on two key properties.