Significance of geographical factors to the COVID-19 outbreak in India
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Significance of geographical factors to the COVID‑19 outbreak in India Amitesh Gupta1,2 · Sreejita Banerjee3 · Sumit Das3 Received: 7 May 2020 / Accepted: 2 June 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Recently, the large outbreak of COVID-19 cases all over the world has whacked India with about 30,000 confirmed cases within the first 3 months of transmission. The present study used long-term climatic records of air temperature (T), rainfall (R), actual evapotranspiration (AET), solar radiation (SR), specific humidity (SH), wind speed (WS) with topographic altitude (E) and population density (PD) at the regional level to investigate the spatial association with the number of COVID-19 infections (NI). Bivariate analysis failed to find any significant relation (except SR) with the number of infected cases within 36 provinces in India. Variable Importance of Projection (VIP) through Partial Least Square (PLS) technique signified higher importance of SR, T, R and AET. However, generalized additive model fitted with the log-transformed value of input variables and applying spline smoothening to PD and E, significantly found high accuracy of prediction (R2 = 0.89), and thus well-explained complex heterogeneity among the association of regional parameters with COVID-19 cases in India. Our study suggests that comparatively hot and dry regions in lower altitude of the Indian territory are more prone to the infection by COVID-19 transmission. Keywords COVID-19 · Geographical factors · Climatic influence · Generalized additive model · India
Introduction Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) already considered as a global pandemic is rapidly spreading across the world and significantly affecting many countries (Singhal 2020; Asyary and Veruswati 2020). This outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) disease began in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China (Gorbalenya 2020; Ma et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2020). By March 25, 2020, the disease had rapidly spread from Wuhan to 196 countries, located Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-020-00838-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Amitesh Gupta [email protected] * Sumit Das [email protected] 1
Marine and Atmospheric Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (ISRO), Dehradun, India
2
Department of Remote Sensing and GIS, JIS University, Kolkata, India
3
Department of Geography, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune 411007, India
in different parts of the world (Chen et al. 2020; Xu et al. 2020). As of April 28, 2020, there have been a total of 3.12 million confirmed cases from all around the world. This contact transmissible disease has an average incubation period from 6 to 14 days (Tosepu et al. 2020). Fever, respiratory disorder, coughing and shortness of breath are some of the early symptoms; while in the acute stage, it can even lead to death (Holshue et al. 2020; Perlman 2020;
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