Coronavirus pandemic versus temperature in the context of Indian subcontinent: a preliminary statistical analysis

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has unleashed havoc across different countries and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Since certain evidences indicate a direct relationship of various viruses with the weather (temperature in particular), the same is being speculated about COVID-19; however, it is still under investigation as the pandemic is advancing the world over. In this study, we tried to analyze the spread of COVID-19 in the Indian subcontinent with respect to the local temperature regimes from March 9, 2020, to May 27, 2020. To establish the relation between COVID-19 and temperature in India, three different ecogeographical regions having significant temperature differences were taken into consideration for the analysis. We observed that except Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Kashmir showed a significantly positive correlation between the number of COVID-19 cases and the temperature during the period of study. The evidences based on the results presented in this research lead us to believe that the increasing temperature is beneficial to the COVID-19 spread, and the cases are going to rise further with the increasing temperature over India. We, therefore, conclude that the existing data, though limited, suggest that the spread of COVID-19 in India is not explained by the variation of temperature alone and is most likely driven by a host of other factors related to epidemiology, socioeconomics and other climatic factors. Based on the results, it is suggested that temperature should not be considered as a yardstick for planning intervention strategies for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.