Statistical investigation of relationship between spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and environmental factors based on study of four mostly affected places of China and five mostly affected places of Italy

TL;DR

This study statistically examines how environmental factors like temperature, humidity, and wind speed relate to COVID-19 case spread in heavily affected Chinese and Italian cities, revealing limited correlations especially with humidity and wind.

Contribution

It provides a comparative statistical analysis of environmental factors affecting COVID-19 spread in specific Chinese and Italian cities, highlighting the limited influence of humidity and wind.

Findings

Maximum relative humidity and wind speed have negligible correlation with COVID-19 cases.

Maximum temperature shows a range from negligible to moderate correlation.

Environmental factors have limited impact on COVID-19 spread in studied locations.

Abstract

COVID-19 is a new type of coronavirus disease which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It originated in China in the month of December 2019 and quickly started to spread within the country. On 31st December 2019, it was first reported to country office of World Health Organization (WHO) in China. Since then, it has spread to most of the countries around the globe. However, there has been a recent rise in trend in believing that it would go away during summer days, which has not yet been properly investigated. In this paper, relationship of daily number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 with three environmental factors, viz. maximum relative humidity (RH_max), maximum temperature (T_max) and highest wind speed (WS_max), considering the incubation period, have been investigated statistically, for four of the most affected places of China, viz. Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Wuhan and five of the most affected places of Italy, viz. Bergamo, Cremona, Lodi, Milano. It has been found that the relationship with maximum relative humidity and highest wind is mostly negligible, whereas relationship with maximum temperature is ranging between negligible to moderate.