Fan, JL;
Da, Y;
Zeng, B;
Zhang, H;
Liu, Z;
Jia, N;
Liu, J;
... Zhang, X; + view all
(2021)
How do weather and climate change impact the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from the Chinese mainland.
Environmental Research Letters
, 16
(1)
, Article 014026. 10.1088/1748-9326/abcf76.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | How do weather and climate change impact the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from the Chinese mainland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1088/1748-9326/abcf76 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abcf76 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10119110 |
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