The impact of temperature on the risk of COVID-19: a multinational study
Journal
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Journal Volume
18
Pages
4052
Date Issued
2021-04-12
Author(s)
Jason Kai Wei Lee
Abstract
The current understanding of ambient temperature and its link to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is unclear. The objective of this study was to explore the environmental and climatic risk factors for SARS-CoV-2. For this study, we analyzed
the data at the beginning of the outbreak (from 20 January to 31 March 2020) to avoid the influence of preventive or control measures. We obtained the number of cases and deaths due to SARS-CoV-2, international tourism, population age, universal health coverage, regional factors, the SARS-CoV-2 testing rate, and population density of a country. A total of 154 countries were included in this study. There were high incidence rates and mortality risks in the countries that had an average ambient temperature between 0 and 10 °C. The adjusted incidence rate for temperatures between 0 and 10 °C was 2.91 (95% CI 2.87–2.95). We randomly divided the data into a training set (80% of data) for model derivation and a test set (20% of data) for validation. Using a random forest statistical model, the model had high accuracy for predicting the high epidemic status of a country (ROC = 95.5%, 95% CI 87.9–100.0%) in the test set. Population age, temperature, and international tourism were the most important factors affecting the risk of SARS-CoV-2 in a country. An understanding the determinants of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak can help to design better strategies for disease control. This study highlights the need to consider thermal effect in the prevention of emerging infectious diseases.
Subjects
Elder; International tourism; SARS-CoV-2; Temperature; Universal health coverage
Other Subjects
air temperature; COVID-19; elderly population; health insurance; health risk; international tourism; risk factor; age; Article; controlled study; coronavirus disease 2019; environmental factor; environmental temperature; epidemic; health insurance; human; incidence; infection risk; mortality rate; mortality risk; population density; predictive value; risk factor; temperature sensitivity; tourism; temperature; SARS coronavirus; COVID-19; COVID-19 Testing; Humans; Population Density; SARS-CoV-2; Temperature
Type
journal article
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ijerph-18-04052.pdf
Size
407.46 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):927b5f871499a45ca2a14c42debf7600