How Environmental Factors Affecting COVID-19 Transmission? Case Study: Riyadh region in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

In this study, I have conducted non-medical, non-clinical-care research that will enable immediate exploring of how environmental factors affect spread of COVID-19 in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It focusses on climatic environmental factors that affect the distribution and population size of disease vectors and the relationship(s) between each of these environmental variables that provided from National Center for Metrology and COVID-19 infected cases from Ministry of Health in KSA. I used daily environmental data, including minimum, maximum, and averages temperatures (°C), rainfall amounts (mm), wind speed (KTS/Deg) and relative humidity (%) over the Riyadh region in Saudi Arabia. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient used to analyze the data. The results showed that average temperatures, minimum temperatures, and maximum temperatures were significantly correlated with a COVID-19 epidemic, (r = 0.527;0.509;0.530 respectively). A negative correlation was found with relative humidity (r= -0.475). These findings will be used as lessons learned as well as best practices in the future to help decision makers to understand the factors controlling COVID-19's spread in KSA.