Does climate help modeling COVID-19 risk and to what extent?

Giovanni Scabbia, Antonio Sanfilippo*, Annamaria Mazzoni, Dunia Bachour, Daniel Perez-Astudillo, Veronica Bermudez, Etienne Wey, Mathilde Marchand-Lasserre, Laurent Saboret

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A growing number of studies suggest that climate may impact the spread of COVID-19. This hypothesis is supported by data from similar viral contagions, such as SARS and the 1918 Flu Pandemic, and corroborated by US influenza data. However, the extent to which climate may affect COVID-19 transmission rates and help modeling COVID-19 risk is still not well understood. This study demonstrates that such an understanding is attainable through the development of regression models that verify how climate contributes to modeling COVID-19 transmission, and the use of feature importance techniques that assess the relative weight of meteorological variables compared to epidemiological, socioeconomic, environmental, and global health factors. The ensuing results show that meteorological factors play a key role in regression models of COVID-19 risk, with ultraviolet radiation (UV) as the main driver. These results are corroborated by statistical correlation analyses and a panel data fixed-effect model confirming that UV radiation coefficients are significantly negatively correlated with COVID-19 transmission rates.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0273078
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume17
Issue number9 September
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2022

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