A cross-sectional analysis of meteorological factors and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in 409 cities across 26 countries
Francesco Sera, Ben Armstrong, Sam Abbott, Sophie Meakin, Kathleen O’Reilly, Rosa von Borries, Rochelle Schneider, Dominic Royé, Masahiro Hashizume, Mathilde Pascal, Aurelio Tobı́as, Ana M. Vicedo‐Cabrera, Wenbiao Hu, Shilu Tong, Éric Lavigne, Patricia Matus Correa, Xia Meng, Haidong Kan, Jan Kynčl, Aleš Urban, Hans Orru, Niilo Ryti, Jouni J. K. Jaakkola, Simon Cauchemez, Marco Dallavalle, Alexandra Schneider, Ariana Zeka, Yasushi Honda, Chris Fook Sheng Ng, Barrak Alahmad, Shilpa Rao, Francesco Di Ruscio, Gabriel Carrasco‐Escobar, Xerxes Seposo, Iulian‐Horia Holobâcă, Ho Kim, Whanhee Lee, Carmen Íñiguez, Martina S. Ragettli, Alicia Alemán, Valentina Colistro, Michelle L. Bell, Antonella Zanobetti, Joel Schwartz, Trần Ngọc Đăng, Noah Scovronick, Micheline de Sousa Zanotti Stagliorio Coêlho, Magali Hurtado‐Díaz, Yuzhou Zhang, CMMID COVID-19 Working Group, Timothy Russell, Mihály Koltai, Adam J. Kucharski, Rosanna C. Barnard, Matthew Quaife, Christopher I Jarvis, Jiayao Lei, James D Munday, Yung-Wai Desmond Chan, Billy J. Quilty, Rosalind M. Eggo, Stefan Flasche, Anna M. Foss, Samuel Clifford, Damien C. Tully, W. John Edmunds, Petra Klepac, Oliver J. Brady, Fabienne Krauer, Simon R. Procter, Thibaut Jombart, Alicia Roselló, Alicia Showering, Sebastian Funk, Joel Hellewell, Fiona Yueqian Sun, Akira Endo, Jack Williams, Amy Gimma, Naomi R. Waterlow, Kiesha Prem, Nikos I Bosse, Hamish Gibbs, Katherine E. Atkins, Carl A. B. Pearson, Yalda Jafari, Christian Julián Villabona‐Arenas, Mark Jit, Emily Nightingale, Nicholas G. Davies, Kevin van Zandvoort, Yang Liu, Frank Sandmann, William Waites, Kaja Abbas, Graham F. Medley, Gwenan M. Knight, Antonio Gasparrini, Rachel Lowe
Abstract
Abstract There is conflicting evidence on the influence of weather on COVID-19 transmission. Our aim is to estimate weather-dependent signatures in the early phase of the pandemic, while controlling for socio-economic factors and non-pharmaceutical interventions. We identify a modest non-linear association between mean temperature and the effective reproduction number (R e ) in 409 cities in 26 countries, with a decrease of 0.087 (95% CI: 0.025; 0.148) for a 10 °C increase. Early interventions have a greater effect on R e with a decrease of 0.285 (95% CI 0.223; 0.347) for a 5th - 95th percentile increase in the government response index. The variation in the effective reproduction number explained by government interventions is 6 times greater than for mean temperature. We find little evidence of meteorological conditions having influenced the early stages of local epidemics and conclude that population behaviour and government interventions are more important drivers of transmission.