Gomez peer virus driver#

Climatic factors were deemed relevant when designing control and prevention measures 9. Those conditions also favored persistence of the virus during the weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, underscoring an increasingly recognized role of humidity in influenza dynamics.

Studies of the 2009 H1N1 influenza viruses suggested that low relative humidity (RH) and high population density shaped the early spread of the virus. So far, over 220 million cases have been recorded, with over 4.7 million deaths 7 and a high mortality, not unlike influenza, in older age groups 8. The emergence of the novel SARS-CoV-2, with a similar geographic and zoonotic origin as SARS 5, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020 6 and has rapidly spread over extensive regions. Both outbreaks were short-lived, and isolation of cases proved sufficient to overcome the restricted ability of these pathogens to transmit between humans. This was the case until the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China 3 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in Saudi Arabia in 2012 4, which featured severe symptoms and high mortality. Unlike influenza, with its well appreciated ability to mutate 2, the few relatively benign coronaviruses did not originally cause alarm. Given the periodic influenza pandemics in the twentieth century-the so-called Spanish flu in 1918, Asian flu in 1957 and Hong Kong flu in 1968-the medical community has been apprehensive about the emergence of novel pathogens with an extensive reach in a more connected world 1. Our results, so far, classify COVID-19 as a seasonal low-temperature infection and suggest an important contribution of the airborne pathway in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with implications for the control measures we discuss.

Gomez peer virus driver#

For COVID-19, in all studied regions and pandemic waves, a process-based model that incorporates a temperature-dependent transmission rate outperforms baseline formulations with no driver or a sinusoidal seasonality. Strong disease responses are identified in the first two waves, suggesting clear ranges for temperature and absolute humidity that are similar to those formerly described for seasonal influenza.

At finer spatial resolutions, we substantiate these connections during the seasonal rise and fall of COVID-19. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show, for COVID-19 cases, strong consistent negative effects of both temperature and absolute humidity at large spatial scales. The roles of climate and true seasonal signatures in the epidemiology of emergent pathogens, and that of SARS-CoV-2 in particular, remain poorly understood.