Demography

Political science

Disease

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Pandemic

Cartography

Optics

Geography

Longitude

Latitude

Sociology

Medicine

Geodesy

Epidemiology

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Incidence (geometry)

Geographic coordinate system

Preparedness

Environmental health

Physics

Pathology

Evolutionary Bioinformatics

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease has spread quickly and massively around the entire globe, causing millions of confirmed cases and deaths worldwide. The disease poses a serious ongoing threat to public health. This study aims to understand the disease potential of the virus in different regions by studying how average spring temperature and its strong predictor, latitude, affect epidemiological variables such as disease incidence, mortality, recovery cases, active cases, testing rate, and hospitalization. We also seek to understand the association of temperature and geographic coordinates with viral genomics. Epidemiological data along with temperature, latitude, longitude, and preparedness index were collected for different countries and US states during the early stages of the pandemic. Our worldwide epidemiological analysis showed a significant correlation between temperature and incidence, mortality, recovery cases and active cases. The same tendency was found with latitude, but not w...

Temperature and Latitude Correlate with SARS-CoV-2 Epidemiological Variables but not with Genomic Change Worldwide