Climate effect on COVID-19 spread rate: an online surveillance tool

Gil Caspi; Uri Shalit; Soren Lund Kristensen; Doron Aronson; Lilac Caspi; Oran Rossenberg; Avi Shina; Oren Caspi

The current study has several limitations. Different mitigation steps were undertaken by each included country during different times affecting the spread of COVID 19 in ways we cannot account for. However, since these mitigation steps have a lag period of approximately14 days (based on the virus incubation time) they may only marginally affect our analysis. Also, as most of our "cold" climate countries are located in Europe, it important to note that ground travel within the European Union was unrestricted until very recently, a variable which may increase the imported spread rate. The lack of standardized criteria for diagnostic testing for COVID-19 between countries affects the incidence and cumulative count. Be that as it may, number of tests performed in each country did not correlate with the RR and RoS. We used the climate parameters of the capital city of each country (and state in the USA) to represent each country in its entirety in order to calculate the RR and RoS as more detailed locations of COVID-19 diagnoses in each country were not available to us, thus local spread within the country was not accounted for . An additional limitation that may warrant further research is the reliance on All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.