Climate affects global patterns of COVID-19 early outbreak dynamics

Gentile Francesco Ficetola; Diego Rubolini

The management of Covid-19 outbreaks is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges governments will face in the coming months. Our spatially-explicit analysis suggests that, at least in some parts of the world, ongoing containment efforts could benefit from the interplay between pathogen spread and local climate. We do not claim that climate is the single major driver of Covid-19 spread. The huge variation of Covid-19 growth rates among regions with 5 similar climate indeed suggests that diverse and complex social and demographic factors, as well as stochasticity, may strongly contribute to determine the severity of Covid-19 outbreaks. Yet, climate can contribute to explain variability in global patterns of Covid-19 growth rates. In the coming months, we may thus expect that large areas of the Southern Hemisphere will show environmental conditions promoting severe Covid-19 outbreaks. Despite climate may mitigate 10 Covid-19 growth rate, in absence of containment actions severe outbreaks are possible also in warm regions (Fig. 1C) , thus stringent measures to prevent disease spread remain pivotal in all the areas of the world (18) . 15