The Weather Impacts the Outbreak of COVID-19 in Mainland China

Huang, Siyu; Liu, Ji; Xiong, Haoyi; Huang, Jizhou; An, Haozhe; Dou, Dejing

Recent literature has suggested that climate conditions have considerably significant influences on the transmission of coronavirus COVID-19. However, there is a lack of comprehensive study that investigates the relationships between multiple weather factors and the development of COVID-19 pandemic while excluding the impact of social factors. In this paper, we study the relationships between six main weather factors and the infection statistics of COVID-19 on 250 cities in Mainland China. Our correlation analysis using weather and infection statistics indicates that all the studied weather factors are correlated with the spread of COVID-19, where precipitation shows the strongest correlation. We also build a weather-aware predictive model that forecasts the number of infected cases should there be a second wave of the outbreak in Mainland China. Our predicted results show that cities located in different geographical areas are likely to be challenged with the second wave of COVID-19 at very different time periods and the severity of the outbreak varies to a large degree, in correspondence with the varying weather conditions.