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.