Does weather influence COVID-19 transmission?

Abstract

Three months after the first reported case of COVID-19, it was declared a pandemic and many countries implemented full or partial lockdowns to protect human lives. The net economic impacts of such policies are still unclear, but with the warm season approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, weather may play a key role in helping governments to define better recovery strategies. Using a global cross-region panel of daily data on 416 regions and 93 days, with multiple fixed effects, we explore the exogenous variations of weather variables to find that temperature reduces COVID-19 transmission up to 8.98%. These effects are stronger in cold, arid and dry climates, diminishing propagation by 12.86%, 12.08% and 10.08%, respectively. Still, it is not clear whether climatic conditions can alone stop or slow the outbreak, but they should be included in models to predict future cases of the disease.