Does temperature and humidity influence the spread of COVID-19?: A preliminary report

Abstract

Introduction: Climate change has been known to influence infectious diseases. The reason for this being the fact; disease agents and their vectors each have particular environments that are optimal for growth, survival, transport, and dissemination. Materials and Methods: The WHO's website was accessed to look for the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation dashboard and comprehensively study and assess the report. An attempt was made to look for countries, areas or territories with maximum and minimum number of cases of lab confirmed COVID cases. Further, we entered the words "Climate" in google for each of the aforementioned countries and searched for the results. A comparison was established by including countries from both the hemispheres (northern and southern). The preliminary analysis was based on the reports from countries with established testing facilities for COVID-19. Results: The report suggests that countries with higher number of cases are the countries with cold weather. These are also the countries with low humidity which could be favoring the transmission and survival of the SARS-COV-2. Conclusions: The results though preliminary point to a pattern which favors the hypothesis that the extensive spread of COVID-19 maybe limited by temperature and humidity.

Keywords

• covid-19
• humidity
• temperature