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- Page navigation anchor for RE: Meteorological and Macro-environmental Variables and Their Influence on COVID-19 DiseaseRE: Meteorological and Macro-environmental Variables and Their Influence on COVID-19 Disease
The research from Jüni et al. is a welcome re-start towards confirming the role of person-person contiguity for COVID-19 transmission especially in the context of numerous studies to date which have purely examined meteorological and other macro-environmental variables, e.g., pollution, in their association with disease.(1) With having read many such studies over the last few months that focused purely on the latter aspects and which have been of variable relevance to person-person transmission, it became evident that, although of interest to the science, these studies missed the most obvious of transmission variables.
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Similar to Jüni et al., others are now adding the ‘human’ variables relating to population mobility and contiguity in their methods and analyses.(2-4) Effectively, and expectedly, spread is much more related to person-person transmission and contaminated environment-person transmission potential. Indeed, without funding, the largest experiments of this kind have been exercised recently in countries such as Spain and the USA where second waves of disease transmission exponentially grow while the human element plays out. Even in the best case scenario, the analyses of meteorological and atmospheric variables otherwise in themselves as factors in COVID-19 transmission would have been markedly skewed by the short periods of assessment.
Whereas the role of person-person spread is paramount to the epidemiology of infection, the potential for the cont...Competing Interests: None declared.References
- 1. Peter Jüni, Martina Rothenbühler, Pavlos Bobos, et al. Impact of climate and public health interventions on the COVID-19 pandemic: a prospective cohort study. CMAJ 2020;192:E566-E573.
- 2. Carteni A, Di Francesco L, Martino M. How mobility habits influenced the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic: results from the Italian case study. Sci Total Environ 2020 Jun 24;741:140489. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140489
- 3. Zhu Y, Xie J, Huang F, Cao L. The mediating effect of air quality on the association between human mobility and COVID-19 infection in China. Environ Res 2020 Jul 9;189:109911. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109911
- 4. Copiello S, Grillenzoni C. The spread of 2019-nCoV in China was primarily driven by population density. Sci Total Environ 2020 Jul 16;744:141028. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141028
- 5. Cimolai N. Environmental and decontamination issues for human coronaviruses and their potential surrogates. J Med Virol. 2020 Jun 12:10.1002/jmv.26170. doi: 10.1002/jmv.26170
- Page navigation anchor for RE: CMAJ Original Articles Impact of climate and public health interventions on the COVID-19 pandemic: A prospective cohort studyRE: CMAJ Original Articles Impact of climate and public health interventions on the COVID-19 pandemic: A prospective cohort study
What makes the selection of countries/regions representative? Why was a country such as Sweden not included? Would there not have been a “magnifying” effect due to all measures being introduced at the same time, ie can you even look at social distancing, stopping of events etc as separate efforts? And how does testing ramp ups affect the data?
Competing Interests: None declared.References
- Peter Jüni, Martina Rothenbühler, Pavlos Bobos, et al. Impact of climate and public health interventions on the COVID-19 pandemic: A prospective cohort study. CMAJ 2020;10.1503/cmaj.200920.