Fontal Alejandro, Bouma Menno J, San-José Adrià, López Leonardo, Pascual Mercedes, Rodó Xavier
Climate and Health (CLIMA) Program, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Nat Comput Sci. 2021 Oct;1(10):655-665. doi: 10.1038/s43588-021-00136-6. Epub 2021 Oct 21.
The roles of climate and true seasonal signatures in the epidemiology of emergent pathogens, and that of SARS-CoV-2 in particular, remain poorly understood. With a statistical method designed to detect transitory associations, we show, for COVID-19 cases, strong consistent negative effects of both temperature and absolute humidity at large spatial scales. At finer spatial resolutions, we substantiate these connections during the seasonal rise and fall of COVID-19. Strong disease responses are identified in the first two waves, suggesting clear ranges for temperature and absolute humidity that are similar to those formerly described for seasonal influenza. For COVID-19, in all studied regions and pandemic waves, a process-based model that incorporates a temperature-dependent transmission rate outperforms baseline formulations with no driver or a sinusoidal seasonality. Our results, so far, classify COVID-19 as a seasonal low-temperature infection and suggest an important contribution of the airborne pathway in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with implications for the control measures we discuss.
气候和真正的季节特征在新兴病原体流行病学中的作用，尤其是严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2（SARS-CoV-2）的作用，仍知之甚少。通过一种旨在检测短暂关联的统计方法，我们发现，对于新冠肺炎病例，在大空间尺度上，温度和绝对湿度均有强烈且一致的负面影响。在更精细的空间分辨率下，我们证实了新冠肺炎季节性增减期间的这些联系。在前两波疫情中发现了强烈的疾病反应，表明温度和绝对湿度的明确范围与先前描述的季节性流感相似。对于新冠肺炎，在所有研究地区和疫情波次中，一个纳入温度依赖性传播率的基于过程的模型优于没有驱动因素或正弦季节性的基线模型。我们目前的结果将新冠肺炎归类为季节性低温感染，并表明空气传播途径在SARS-CoV-2传播中起重要作用，这对我们讨论的控制措施具有启示意义。
