Climatic influences on the worldwide spread of SARS-CoV-2

Michail Bariotakis; George Sourvinos; Elias Castanas; Stergios A Pirintsos

Potential areas of infection, covering the period 02 February to 04 March, 2020, as predicted by our models (Figure 1 ) follow a shift towards Europe, which becomes more pronounced with time. This shift is followed by an expansion, covering areas of the Middle East and Northern Africa, as well as Eastern coastal areas of North America, South-Eastern coastal areas of Latin America and two areas of Southern Australia. With the integration of new cases, the precision of the model increases (eFigure 1 in the Supplement), attaining a positive predictive value over 90%. Indeed, the outburst of infections in Europe and California are correctly predicted. However, it should be noted that the potential predicted infections might not always coincide with the actual ones. Figure 2 . Importance of the most dominant bioclimatic predictors for each model (permutation analysis). Only predictors with mean importance of at least 5% are shown. Variables are as follows: bio1 = annual mean temperature, bio2 = mean diurnal range, bio3 = isothermality, bio6 = min temperature of the coldest month, bio8 = mean temperature of the wettest quarter, bio14 = precipitation of the driest month, bio19 = precipitation of the coldest quarter.