TY - JOUR
T1 - Impacts of natural environmental factors and prevalence of airway symptoms on the local spread of covid-19
T2 - A time-series analysis in regional covid-19 epidemics
AU - Ishii, Tadashi
AU - Kushimoto, Shigeki
AU - Katori, Yukio
AU - Kure, Shigeo
AU - Igarashi, Kaoru
AU - Fujita, Motoo
AU - Sugawara, Noriko
AU - Takayama, Shin
AU - Abe, Michiaki
AU - Tanaka, Junichi
AU - Kikuchi, Akiko
AU - Abe, Yoshiko
AU - Imai, Hiroyuki
AU - Inaba, Yohei
AU - Iwamatsu-Kobayashi, Yoko
AU - Nishioka, Takashi
AU - Onodera, Ko
AU - Akaishi, Tetsuya
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors deeply thank all medical staffs who joined and cooperated to the present COVID-19 screening test project. Also, we deeply thank local government staffs of Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, and public health centers for supporting the present study by establishing and managing the testing center, interviewing each individual ahead of testing about the contact history and symptoms, and per-forming contact tracing based on the achieved test results.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Tohoku University Medical Press.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is the world’s largest public health concern in 2021. This study evaluated the associations of the prevalence of airway symptoms among the tested individuals and data regarding the natural environmental factors with the weekly number of newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients in Sendai City (Nt). For the derivatives of the screening test results, data from individuals with a contact history who underwent nasopharyngeal swab reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing between July 2020 and April 2021 (6,156 participants, including 550 test-positive patients) were used. The value of Nt correlated with the weekly RT-PCR test-positive rate after close contact, prevalence of cough symptoms in test-positive individuals or in test-negative individuals, lower air temperature, lower air humidity, and higher wind speed. The weekly test-positive rate correlated with lower air humidity and higher wind speed. In cross-correlation analyses, natural environmental factors correlated with the regional epidemic status on a scale of months, whereas the airway symptoms among non-COVID-19 population affected on a scale of weeks. When applying an autoregression model to the serial data of Nt, large-scale movements of people were suggested to be another factor to influence the local epidemics on a scale of days. In conclusion, the prevalence of cough symptoms in the local population, lower air humidity or higher wind speed, and large-scale movements of people in the locality would jointly influence the local epidemic status of COVID-19.
AB - Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is the world’s largest public health concern in 2021. This study evaluated the associations of the prevalence of airway symptoms among the tested individuals and data regarding the natural environmental factors with the weekly number of newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients in Sendai City (Nt). For the derivatives of the screening test results, data from individuals with a contact history who underwent nasopharyngeal swab reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing between July 2020 and April 2021 (6,156 participants, including 550 test-positive patients) were used. The value of Nt correlated with the weekly RT-PCR test-positive rate after close contact, prevalence of cough symptoms in test-positive individuals or in test-negative individuals, lower air temperature, lower air humidity, and higher wind speed. The weekly test-positive rate correlated with lower air humidity and higher wind speed. In cross-correlation analyses, natural environmental factors correlated with the regional epidemic status on a scale of months, whereas the airway symptoms among non-COVID-19 population affected on a scale of weeks. When applying an autoregression model to the serial data of Nt, large-scale movements of people were suggested to be another factor to influence the local epidemics on a scale of days. In conclusion, the prevalence of cough symptoms in the local population, lower air humidity or higher wind speed, and large-scale movements of people in the locality would jointly influence the local epidemic status of COVID-19.
KW - Atmospheric humidity
KW - Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
KW - Cough symptoms
KW - Local epidemics
KW - Time-series analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109043702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85109043702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1620/tjem.254.89
DO - 10.1620/tjem.254.89
M3 - Article
C2 - 34162780
AN - SCOPUS:85109043702
VL - 254
SP - 89
EP - 100
JO - Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine
JF - Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine
SN - 0040-8727
IS - 2
ER -