Short-term effects of specific humidity and temperature on COVID-19 morbidity in select US cities.
Sci Total Environ
; 740: 140093, 2020 Oct 20.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-600991
ABSTRACT
Little is known about the environmental conditions that drive the spatiotemporal patterns of SARS-CoV-2. Preliminary research suggests an association with meteorological parameters. However, the relationship with temperature and humidity is not yet apparent for COVID-19 cases in US cities first impacted. The objective of this study is to evaluate the association between COVID-19 cases and meteorological parameters in select US cities. A case-crossover design with a distributed lag nonlinear model was used to evaluate the contribution of ambient temperature and specific humidity on COVID-19 cases in select US cities. The case-crossover examines each COVID case as its own control at different time periods (before and after transmission occurred). We modeled the effect of temperature and humidity on COVID-19 transmission using a lag period of 7 days. A subset of 8 cities were evaluated for the relationship with meteorological parameters and 5 cities were evaluated in detail. Short-term exposure to humidity was positively associated with COVID-19 transmission in 4 cities. The associations were small with 3 out of 4 cities exhibiting higher COVID19 transmission with specific humidity that ranged from 6 to 9 g/kg. Our results suggest that weather should be considered in infectious disease modeling efforts. Future work is needed over a longer time period and across different locations to clearly establish the weather-COVID19 relationship.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Temperature
/
Coronavirus Infections
/
Humidity
Type of study:
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Sci Total Environ
Year:
2020
Document Type:
Article
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