Analysis of transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 under seasonal change

Abstract

In this paper, we explore whether the activity of SARS-CoV-2 was associated with seasonality. MF-DFA model is utilized to calculate multifractal strength and multifractal complexity to evaluate the change state of SARS-CoV-2 activity. We select 10 countries with serious epidemic in the world, which are distributed in different latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres. The study utilized the time series data of daily new cases and daily new deaths recorded in these countries. We regard May to October as the “high temperature season” for countries in the northern hemisphere, November to April as the “low temperature season”, and the southern hemisphere is just the opposite. By comparing the multifractal intensity [Formula: see text] and multifractal complexity [Formula: see text] of the two time series in the two seasons, we draw a conclusion that, for both the sequence of the daily newly diagnosed persons and the daily newly increased number of deaths, in the countries of both the northern and southern hemispheres, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are weaker in the “low temperature season”. That is, in the low temperature environment, SARS-CoV-2 can survive for a long time and be more infectious. In addition, we also observe that in the northern hemisphere, Iran is at a lower latitude, and although the SARS-CoV-2 activity in the low temperature season is higher than that in the high temperature season, the difference is not significant. Therefore, the lower latitude may resist this phenomenon. However, most of the countries in the southern hemisphere are within 30[Formula: see text] of south latitude, with low latitude, and other meteorological characteristics such as humidity in the countries in the southern hemisphere are also relatively unique. Although SARS-CoV-2 is characterized by high activity in low temperature seasons, no direct evidence related to the characteristics of latitude distribution has been found.