Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus likely to be constrained by climate

Miguel B. Araujo; Babak Naimi

Predictor variables importance Variable importance (55) and response curves (56) were estimated to infer the explanatory power and shape of the relationship for each one of the predictor variables used and the distribution of positive cases of SARS-CoV-2. Response curves are generated with the evaluation strip procedure (56) , implemented in sdm-R (11) . For each climate variable, the method generates the predicted probability of occurrence over all values in the gradient of the climate variable while the other climate variables are kept at their mean values. Then, visualizing the predicted values against the climate gradient represents the response of the species to the climate variable.