ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Research Article | Open Access
Md. Arifur Rahman1,5, Md. Golzar Hossain1,7, Atul Chandra Singha3,8†, Md. Sayeedul Islam4 and Md Ariful Islam2,6
1Division of Virology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, Japan.
2Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Osaka University, Japan.
3Division of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, Japan.
4Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University, Japan.
5Department of Microbiology, Noakhali Science and Technology University, Noakhali, Bangladesh.
6Department of Pharmacy, Noakhali Science and Technology University, Noakhali, Bangladesh.
7Department of Microbiology and Hygiene, Bangladesh Agricultural University; Mymensingh, Bangladesh.
8Department of statistics, Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur, Bangladesh.
† These authors contributed equally to this work
J Pure Appl Microbiol. 2020;14(3):1705-1714 | Article Number: 6631
https://doi.org/10.22207/JPAM.14.3.09 | © The Author(s). 2020
Received: 03/09/2020 | Accepted: 17/09/2020 | Published: 28/09/2020
Abstract

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses causing mild to severe upper respiratory tract syndrome. Recent pandemic threat caused by SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Whether the COVID-19 might be affected by warming global temperatures like some of previous pandemic flues. Therefore, the current study aims to analyze the effect of temperature and relative humidity (RH) on the spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 infection. The confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 31 different provinces in China and 274 provinces and/or countries were obtained from an online database. The real time temperature and humidity of the respective regions were taken from another online weather reporting data source. Spearman [R(s)] rank correlation was performed to identify the relationship between the variables (e.g., temperature, number of confirmed cases etc.).  The overall spreading of SARS-CoV-2 in relations to temperature was inversely correlated. Among 29 of 31 provinces of China the overall correlation coeffient of the relationship between temperature and viral spread was negative [-R(s)] where in 15 provinces the correlation was at significant level (p<0.05). Furthermore, there was a significant negative relationship observed between the SARS-CoV-2 spreading and air temperature throughout the 274 provinces and/or countries of the world. However, there was no significant co-relationship between humidity and COVID-19 spreading either in China or among countries and/or various regions of the world. The SARS-CoV-2 infection seems to be spread in a wide range of temperature throughout the world. Thus, several factors including temperature, may influnce the SARS-CoV-2 spreading. As a results, relatively elevated air temperature could not completely prevent viral spread but it might be one of the important detrimental factors for SARS-CoV-2 rapid spread.

Keywords

SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, Infectivity, Temperature and Humidity

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© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided 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.