Is the weather-induced COVID-19 spread hypothesis a myth or reality? Evidence from the Russian Federation
- PDF / 261,740 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 35 Downloads / 177 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Is the weather-induced COVID-19 spread hypothesis a myth or reality? Evidence from the Russian Federation Taiwo Temitope Lasisi 1
&
Kayode Kolawole Eluwole 2,1
Received: 23 June 2020 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Several conspiracy theories and hypotheses have been postulated by some individuals from various strata of governance globally concerning the outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus in the last quarter of 2019. A pertinent hypothesis is the correlation of meteorological elements to the spread of the pandemic. To verify this claim and also confirm the initial findings of Tosepu et al.’s (2020), this study investigated the Spearman rank-order correlation of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the Russian Federation with temperature—maximum, minimum, and average as well as precipitation. Our findings indicated a stronger correlation between average temperature (rs = 0.75***) and also recorded significant correlations for the other variants of temperature. Hence, the hypothesis of weather-induced COVID-19 spread is substantiated. Keywords COVID-19 . Meteorology . Temperature . Precipitation . Russia
Introduction The first pneumonia cases with unknown etiology were first discovered in Wuhan, China in early December 2019 (Guan et al. 2020). This outbreak elicited intense cautionary notice not only within China but across the world. The Chinese health specialists carried out an urgent investigation to typify and rheostat the disease; this includes isolating suspected diseased individuals, meticulous monitoring of people that have been in contact with the affected individuals, clinical and epidemiological data collection, and spawning diagnostic and treatment procedures (Wang et al. 2020). According to Li et al. (2020), until early January 2020, the government of China declared the pneumonia was coronavirus or COVID19, and the World Health Organization has declared the disease a pandemic of international concern (Sohrabi et al. 2020).
Responsible Editor: Lotfi Aleya * Taiwo Temitope Lasisi [email protected] 1
Department of Management, South Ural State University, Chelyabinsk, Russia
2
School of Tourism and Hotel Management, Bahçeşehir Cyprus University, Via Mersin 10 Mustafa Kemal Caddesi, Osmanlar Sokak No: 1, Alakoy, Lefkosa, Turkey
The first coronavirus case and death case in Russia was discovered in Moscow on March 2 and 19, 2020 (The New York Times 2020), and as of June 12, 2020, the confirmed cases have increased to 511,423 (The Moscow Times 2020). Six provinces with the highest number of coronavirus cases are Moscow (202,935), Moscow Oblast (47,911), Saint Petersburg (20,043), Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (13,562), Sverdlovsk Oblast (8826), and Rostov Oblast (7152) (Statista 2020). The rise in the cases occurred rapidly and has since spread across the Federation (see Fig. 1). There has been growing interest in the relationship between climate variables and respiratory virus spread. According to Baker
Data Loading...
