Predictions, role of interventions and effects of a historic national lockdown in India's response to the COVID-19 pandemic: data science call to arms

Debashree Ray; Maxwell Salvatore; Rupam Bhattacharyya; Lili Wang; Shariq Mohammed; Soumik Purkayastha; Aritra Halder; Alexander Rix; Daniel Barker; Michael Kleinsasser; Yiwang Zhou; Peter Song; Debraj Bose; Mousumi Banerjee; Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani; Parikshit Ghosh; Bhramar Mukherjee

There are many hypotheses regarding the slow growth rate of COVID-19 cases in many countries, particularly low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Some of these hypotheses include the use of Bacille Calmette Guerin (BCG) vaccine, 17 younger population, 18 high daily temperature, 19 use of anti-malarials 20 and host genetics. 21 Here, we only explore the temperature hypothesis related to COVID-19 incidence. We assessed any correlation between country-wise average monthly temperature and total incidence of COVID-19. The monthly average temperature for major cities across the world was used to compute the monthly average temperature for each country experiencing COVID-19 outbreak by averaging across the major cities within a country. Missing data for average temperature for certain countries was manually appended from www.weatheratlas.com. 22 We computed the Pearson correlation coefficient, , between the average monthly temperature and total monthly incidence during each month of January, February and March. We used the Fisher's z-transformation to compute z = 0.5 log + ,-.