Abstract

There is conflicting evidence on the influence of weather on COVID-19 transmission. Our aim is to estimate weather-dependent signatures in the early phase of the pandemic, while controlling for socio-economic factors and non-pharmaceutical interventions. We identify a modest non-linear association between mean temperature and the effective reproduction number (Re) in 409 cities in 26 countries, with a decrease of 0.087 (95% CI: 0.025; 0.148) for a 10 °C increase. Early interventions have a greater effect on Re with a decrease of 0.285 (95% CI 0.223; 0.347) for a 5th - 95th percentile increase in the government response index. The variation in the effective reproduction number explained by government interventions is 6 times greater than for mean temperature. We find little evidence of meteorological conditions having influenced the early stages of local epidemics and conclude that population behaviour and government interventions are more important drivers of transmission.

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Cite as

Sera, F., Armstrong, B., Abbott, S., Meakin, S., O'Reilly, K., von Borries, R., Schneider, R., Royé, D., Hashizume, M., Pascal, M., Tobias, A., Vicedo-Cabrera, A., MCC Collaborative Research Network, CMMID COVID-19 Working Group, Gasparrini, A. & Lowe, R. 2021, 'A cross-sectional analysis of meteorological factors and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in 409 cities across 26 countries', Nature Communications, 12(1), article no: 5968. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25914-8

Downloadable citations

Download HTML citationHTML Download BIB citationBIB Download RIS citationRIS
Last updated: 01 April 2023
Was this page helpful?