Short-term effects of specific humidity and temperature on COVID-19 morbidity in select US cities
Autor
Runkle, Jennifer D.
Sugg, Margaret M.
Leeper, Ronald D.
Rao, Yuhan
Matthews, Jessica L.
Rennie, Jared J.
Institución
Resumen
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. Shortterm 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.