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 centrality measure is widely used to discover distinguished nodes on many networks, including epidemiological networks (e.g., Madotto and Liu, 2016) . Our findings reinforce the importance of propagule pressure on disease dissemination (Tian et al 2017 , Chinazzi et al. 2020 . It is quite likely that further phases of COVID-19 spread, in terms of peak of infections and decrease in mortality rates, are better related to socioeconomics characteristics of each county and their political decisions when secondary transmissions were identified. We can already clearly identify the effects of adopting strong social isolation policies in China (see Kraemer et al. 2020 ) and, on the opposite side of this spectrum, in European countries like Italy, Spain and England (Enserink and Kupferschmidt 2020). Our analyses call attention to the case of Brazil, a well-connected tropical country that presents the second highest increase rates of COVID-19 in its exponential phase (Fig 1A) . If decision makers take into consideration . CC-BY-NC-ND 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.