Kerr Gaige Hunter, Badr Hamada S, Barbieri Alisson F, Colston Josh M, Gardner Lauren M, Kosek Margaret N, Zaitchik Benjamin F
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health George Washington University Washington DC USA.
Department of Civil and Systems Engineering Johns Hopkins University Baltimore MD USA.
Geohealth. 2023 Mar 21;7(3):e2022GH000727. doi: 10.1029/2022GH000727. eCollection 2023 Mar.
Brazil has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Temperature and humidity have been purported as drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but no consensus has been reached in the literature regarding the relative roles of meteorology, governmental policy, and mobility on transmission in Brazil. We compiled data on meteorology, governmental policy, and mobility in Brazil's 26 states and one federal district from June 2020 to August 2021. Associations between these variables and the time-varying reproductive number ( ) of SARS-CoV-2 were examined using generalized additive models fit to data from the entire 15-month period and several shorter, 3-month periods. Accumulated local effects and variable importance metrics were calculated to analyze the relationship between input variables and . We found that transmission is strongly influenced by unmeasured sources of between-state heterogeneity and the near-recent trajectory of the pandemic. Increased temperature generally was associated with decreased transmission and increased specific humidity with increased transmission. However, the impacts of meteorology, policy, and mobility on varied in direction, magnitude, and significance across our study period. This time variance could explain inconsistencies in the published literature to date. While meteorology weakly modulates SARS-CoV-2 transmission, daily or seasonal weather variations alone will not stave off future surges in COVID-19 cases in Brazil. Investigating how the roles of environmental factors and disease control interventions may vary with time should be a deliberate consideration of future research on the drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
巴西受到了新冠疫情的严重影响。温度和湿度被认为是新冠病毒传播的驱动因素，但关于气象、政府政策和流动性在巴西传播中的相对作用，文献中尚未达成共识。我们收集了2020年6月至2021年8月巴西26个州和一个联邦区的气象、政府政策和流动性数据。使用广义相加模型对整个15个月期间以及几个较短的3个月期间的数据进行拟合，研究了这些变量与新冠病毒随时间变化的繁殖数（ ）之间的关联。计算累积局部效应和变量重要性指标，以分析输入变量与 之间的关系。我们发现，传播受到未测量的州间异质性来源和疫情近期轨迹的强烈影响。温度升高通常与传播减少相关，比湿增加与传播增加相关。然而，在我们的研究期间，气象、政策和流动性对 的影响在方向、幅度和显著性上各不相同。这种时间差异可以解释迄今为止已发表文献中的不一致之处。虽然气象对新冠病毒传播的调节作用较弱，但仅靠每日或季节性的天气变化无法避免巴西未来新冠病例的激增。研究环境因素和疾病控制干预措施的作用如何随时间变化，应该是未来关于新冠病毒传播驱动因素研究的一个慎重考虑。
