Impact of climate change on SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in China

RESEARCH ARTICLE Impact of climate change on SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in China Zhenyu Yu1,2, Jinnian Wang1,2*, Zixuan Tan1,2, Yiyun Luo1,2 1 School of Geography and Remote Sensing, Guangzhou University, Guangdong, China, 2 Innovation Center for Remote Sensing Big Data Intelligent Applications, Guangzhou University, Guangdong, China * jnwang@gzhu.edu.cn Abstract The outbreak and prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 have severely affected social security. Physi- cal isolation is an effective control that affects the short-term human-to-human transmission of the epidemic, although weather presents a long-term effect. Understanding the effect of weather on the outbreak allow it to be contained at the earliest possible. China is selected as the study area, and six weather factors that receive the most attention from January 20, 2020 to April 30, 2020 are selected to investigate the correlation between weather and SARS-CoV-2 to provide a theoretical basis for long-term epidemic prevention and control. The results show that (1) the average growth rate (GR) of SARS-CoV-2 in each province is logarithmically distributed with a mean value of 5.15%. The GR of the southeastern region is higher than that of the northwestern region, which is consistent with the Hu Line. (2) The specific humidity, 2-m temperature (T), ultraviolet (UV) radiation, and wind speed (WS) adversely affect the GR. By contrast, the total precipitation (TP) and surface pressure (SP) promote the GR. (3) For every 1 unit increase in UV radiation, the GR decreases by 0.30%

in 11 days, and the UV radiation in China is higher than that worldwide (0.92% higher per day). Higher population aggregation and urbanization directly affect the epidemic, and weather is an indirect factor. Introduction In late 2019, the coronavirus was discovered in multiple locations worldwide and began spreading worldwide in 2020 [1, 2]. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses known to cause severe diseases, such as cold, the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) [3–5]. On January 12, 2020, the World Health Organiza- tion officially named this novel coronavirus, “2019-nCoV”. On February 11, 2020, the Interna- tional Committee for Virus Taxonomy announced its official name as SARS-CoV-2 [6]. As of May 20, 2020, 215 outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 have been reported in 215 countries worldwide, with more than 4,895,000 cumulative diagnoses and 324,000 cumulative deaths, and have received significant attention worldwide [7, 8]. The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 pose a severe risk to social security. Understanding the effects of weather on an outbreak allows the spread of the outbreak to be contained at the earliest possible. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285179 July 27, 2023 1 / 21 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Yu Z, Wang J, Tan Z, Luo Y (2023) Impact of climate change on SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in China. PLoS ONE 18(7): e0285179. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285179 Editor: Mohammed Magdy Hamed, Arab Academy

for Science Technology and Maritime Transport, EGYPT Received: January 31, 2023 Accepted: April 16, 2023 Published: July 27, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Yu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China [2021YFE0117300]. The funder supervised and organized the project and conceived the idea for the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.