Roles of meteorological conditions in COVID-19 transmission on a worldwide scale

Biqing Chen; Hao Liang; Xiaomin Yuan; Yingying Hu; Miao Xu; Yating Zhao; Binfen Zhang; Fang Tian; Xuejun Zhu

There were in total 39,888 confirmed cases in Wuhan, and 14,511 confirmed cases in 59 Chinese cities /districts with monthly confirmed cases no less than 50, therefore, the discovery dataset was consisted of 1133 records of data with 54,399 confirmed cases in 60 cities in China. The confirmed new cases in Wuhan on February 13, 2020, reached 13,436, which was oddly high as the daily confirmed new cases were no larger than 3,000 on all the other dates in Wuhan or in all the other cities. We suppose that it might be due to supplement of enough virus test kits on that day. In order to reduce the potential contamination of modeling by this outlier, we substituted the counts on that day by four, that was 13,436/4=3,359, which was still the largest number but not deviated from the dataset too much. Except this outlier, the daily confirmed new cases in the discovery dataset ranged from 1 to 2997, the average temperature ranged -23.54℃ ~ 22.85℃, the wind speed ranged 1.33 ~ 26 miles per hour, visibility ranged 0.425 ~ 110 statute miles to nearest tenth, and relative humidity ranged 31.4% ~ 100%. The temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity ranges in the other replication datasets were similar to the discovery dataset, while the maximum visibility in the replication datasets was lower than that in the discovery dataset (Table 1) . . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.