3. Results and discussion
Sharp rise in daily infective as well as active cases are noted together
with mortality rate. But in a dense country like India recovery rate is
also satisfactory. India is considered as warm country and temperature
plays important role in spread of COVID-19. During the Year 2020,
maximum temperature varies from 2 to 45°C and minimum temperature varies
from -5 to 31°C. With rise of temperature the droplets which falls on
the ground immediately dries due to extreme temperature. The areas where
the daily fluctuation rate of temperature is high suffers a lot. In
India from March onwards the COVID-19 is at its peak the temperature is
also not so much high but from April onwards there is slight decline in
number of cases (Figure 1). But spread of any pandemic diseases also
depends upon personal contact. Government of India implemented strict
rules of Lockdown as there is no other alternatives as there is no
vaccine and no other medicines to control them. Less number of cases in
dense country like India is also possible due to strong implementation
of lockdown.
The temperature dependency of COVID-19 may be similar to that of
SARS-Cov which loses its ability to survive in higher temperatures (Chan
et al., 2011), due to the breakdown of their lipid layer at higher
temperatures (Schoeman and Fielding, 2019) . With approaching summer,
there is redundancy in number of cases it may also be that the
temperature ranges we have seen so far for most of the cases upto 17 to
18 °C the virus is at its peak but as the temperature approaches tpwards
25°C the peak gradually declines.
Table 1 and Table 2 presents the empirical correlation coefficients with
scatter plot on Figure 2 . From both tables it is clear that tempmax has
more positve correlation with distribution of COVID-19. It clearly
suggests that maxtemperature has inhibitory effect on COVID-19 whereas
minmtemp supports the spread of the disease. Previous studies of Tan et
al. (2005) and Vandini et al. (2013) support our findings. Shi et al.
(2020) and Bashir et al. (2020) also researched climate indicators and
stated that temperature serves as a driver for the COVID-19.
Despite strong evidence of temperature association with COVID-19,
provides the following limitations. First, more variables are needed to
conduct a comprehensive study as COVID-19 is an infectious disease and
it is affected by many variables such as humidity, rainfall, wind speed,
social distancing, people’s endurance and availability of health
facilities. Second, data about personal hygiene indicators such as hand
wash needs to be explored in further studies.