The effects of indoor temperature and humidity on local transmission of COVID-19 and how it relates to global trends

Han June Park, Sung-Gwang Lee, Jeong Suk Oh, Minhyuk Nam, Steven Barrett, Soohyung Lee and Wontae Hwang

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-20

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, analyses on global data have not reached unanimous consensus on whether warmer and humid weather curbs the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We conjectured that this lack of consensus is due to the discrepancy between global environmental data such as temperature and humidity being collected outdoors, while most infections have been reported to occur indoors, where conditions can be different. Thus, we have methodologically investigated the effect of temperature and relative humidity on the spread of expired respiratory droplets from the mouth, which are assumed to be the main cause of most short-range infections. Calculating the trajectory of individual droplets using an experimentally validated evaporation model, the final height and distance of the evaporated droplets is obtained, and then correlated with global COVID-19 spread. Increase in indoor humidity is associated with reduction in COVID-19 spread, while temperature has no statistically significant effect.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0271760 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 71760&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0271760

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271760

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().