Roles of meteorological conditions in COVID-19 transmission on a worldwide scale

Biqing Chen; Hao Liang; Xiaomin Yuan; Yingying Hu; Miao Xu; Yating Zhao; Binfen Zhang; Fang Tian; Xuejun Zhu

Epidemiological data. Epidemiological data were collected from various sources, including the World Health Organization (WHO) 4 , China Center for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (especially for data in Italy), Japan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and DXY-COVID-19-Data, a Chinese website that aggregates national and local CCDC situation reports in near real-time 5 . The daily new confirmed case counts were collected from January 20, 2020 (i.e., WHO published the first situation report) to March 11, 2020 . For China, incidence data were collected for every city or district, leading to 430 sites covering the whole country. Considering the potential confounding effect, only cities with no less than 50 cumulative confirmed cases in one month and without official reports of imported cases in majority were taken into a discovery dataset. A second set of cities with 10~49 cumulative confirmed cases in one month was taken as an replication dataset (so called replication_China). For Italy and Japan, incidence data were collected for each province/ city/ district, in total, 21 . 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.