How do weather and climate change impact the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from the Chinese mainland. (28th December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fan, Jing-Li; Da, Yabin; Zeng, Bin; Zhang, Hao; Liu, Zhu; Jia, Na; Liu, Jue; Wang, Bin; Li, Lanlan; Guan, Dabo; Zhang, Xian
• Is Part Of: Environmental research letters. Volume 16:Number 1(2021)
• Publication Date: 2020-12-28
• Subjects: weather -- COVID-19 -- climate change -- global warming; Environmental sciences -- Periodicals; Human ecology -- Research -- Periodicals; Environmental health -- Periodicals; 333.7
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abcf76
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1748-9326

Abstract

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand, while the relationship between weather conditions and the spread of the virus remains largely debatable. In this paper, we attempt to examine this question by employing a flexible econometric model coupled with fine-scaled hourly temperature variations and a rich set of covariates for 291 cities in the Chinese mainland. More importantly, we combine the baseline estimates with climate-change projections from 21 global climate models to understand the pandemic in different scenarios. We found a significant negative relationship between temperatures and caseload. A one-hour increase in temperatures from 25 °C to 28 °C tends to reduce daily cases by 15.1%, relative to such an increase from −2 °C to 1 °C. Our results also suggest an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between relative humidity and confirmed cases. Despite the negative effects of heat, we found that rising temperatures induced by climate change are unlikely to contain a hypothesized pandemic in the future. In contrast, cases would tend to increase by 10.9% from 2040 to 2059 with a representative concentration pathway (RCP) of 4.5 and by 7.5% at an RCP of 8.5, relative to 2020, though reductions of 1.8% and 18.9% were projected for 2080–2099 for the same RCPs, respectively. These findings raise concerns that the pandemic could worsen under the climate-change framework.