Significance of weather condition, human mobility, and vaccination on global COVID-19 transmission

Abstract

The transmission growth rate of infectious diseases, particularly COVID-19, has forced governments to take immediate control decisions. Previous studies have shown that human mobility, weather condition, and vaccination are potential factors influencing virus transmission. This study investigates the contribution of weather conditions, namely temperature and precipitation, human mobility, and vaccination to coronavirus transmission. Three machine learning models: random forest (RF), XGBoost, and neural networks, are applied to predict the confirmed cases based on three aforementioned variables. All models’ prediction are evaluated via spatial and temporal analysis. The spatial analysis observes the model performance over countries on certain times. The temporal analysis looks at the model prediction of each country during the specified period. The models’ prediction results effectively indicate the transmission trend. The RF model performs best with a coefficient of determination of up to 89%. Meanwhile, all models confirm that vaccination is most significantly associated with COVID-19 cases.