Future risk evaluation of the global COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused more than 150 million cases of infection to date and poses a serious threat to global public health. In this work, global COVID-19 data were used to examine the dynamical variations from the perspectives of immunity and contact of 85 countries across the five climate regions: tropical, arid, temperate, cold, and polar. A new approach is proposed to obtain the transmission rates based on the COVID-19 data between the countries with the same climate region over the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Southern Hemisphere (SH). Our results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will persist over a long period of time or enter into regular circulation in multiple periods of 1-2 years. Moreover, based on the simulated results by the COVID-19 data, it is found that the temperate and cold climate regions have higher infection rates than the tropical and arid climate regions, which indicates that climate may modulate the transmission of COVID-19. The role of the climate on the COVID-19 variations should be concluded with more data and more cautions. The non-pharmaceutical interventions still play the key role in controlling and prevention this global pandemic.