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

Mohammad Alamgir Hossain

(which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20058164 doi: medRxiv preprint 3 of a pathogen. Apart from biological properties, it is susceptible that few environmental, social and economic elements can act as possible catalysts for the spread of novel Coronavirus. First, connection with China is likely to be an important factor for rapid transmission of the disease at the initial stage of the pandemic. As the virus continues to spread many countries, any connection with badly effected countries may equally responsible for the transmission. In other words, level of international connection of a country is probably playing a vital role in country-tocountry transmission of the virus. International trade, alternatively economic openness can be treated as a good measure of international connection of a country. Thus, economic openness is likely to play an important role in the spread of the disease. If a country is more open, the virus will find it easier to transmit from human to human by crossing national borders. Once the virus is in, the rate of spread within a country will depend on several factors, some of which are difficult to identify, some though can be pointed out by educated guess. Population density, level of urbanization, social cohesiveness and weather conditions can be primarily identified as influential factors of human-to-human transmission of a pathogen. Viability of infectious viruses is found being affected markedly by environmental factors like temperature and humidity 3 .