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A Proposal for Isotherm World Maps to Forecast the Seasonal Evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic
Version 1
: Received: 5 April 2020 / Approved: 6 April 2020 / Online: 6 April 2020 (14:11:52 CEST)
How to cite: Scafetta, N. A Proposal for Isotherm World Maps to Forecast the Seasonal Evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. Preprints 2020, 2020040063. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202004.0063.v1 Scafetta, N. A Proposal for Isotherm World Maps to Forecast the Seasonal Evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. Preprints 2020, 2020040063. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202004.0063.v1
Abstract
This paper investigates whether the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic – also known as COronaVIrus Disease 19 (COVID-19) – could have been favored by specific weather conditions. It was found that the 2020 winter weather in the region of Wuhan (Hubei, Central China) – where the virus first broke out in December and spread widely from January to February 2020 – was strikingly similar to that of the Northern Italian provinces of Milan, Brescia and Bergamo, where the pandemic has been very severe from February to March. The similarity suggests that this pandemic worsens under weather temperatures between 4°C and 11°C. Based on this result, specific isotherm world maps were generated to locate, month by month, the world regions that share similar temperature ranges. From January to March, this isotherm zone extended mostly from Central China toward Iran, Turkey, West-Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Spain and France) up to the United State of America, coinciding with the geographic regions most affected by the pandemic from January to March. It is predicted that next spring, as the weather gets warm, the pandemic will likely worsen in northern regions (United Kingdom, Germany, East Europe, Russia and North America) while the situation will likely improve in the southern regions (Italy and Spain). However, in autumn, the pandemic could come back and affect the same regions again. The Tropical Zone and the entire Southern Hemisphere, but in restricted southern regions, could avoid a strong pandemic because of the sufficiently warm weather during the entire year. Google-Earth-Pro interactive-maps are provided as supplements.
Keywords
SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; Pandemic geographical distribution; Epidemic forecasting; Weather conditions; Climatic zones.
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Virology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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