key: cord-341212-dk6ioi15
authors: Ribeiro, Andre Luis Ribeiro; Sousa, Naama Waléria Alves; Carvalho, Vitor Oliveira
title: Besides the climate model, other variables driving the COVID-19 spread in Brazil()
date: 2020-06-15
journal: Sci Total Environ
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140211
sha: 
doc_id: 341212
cord_uid: dk6ioi15

nan

We have read with great interest the study by Auler et al. (Auler et al., 2020) , about the influence of climate on COVID-19 spread. The authors considered data from the five most affected cities by the current pandemic in Brazil. The authors used meteorological data from 13 th of March to 17 th of April 2020 and analyzed weather conditions such as temperature, relative humidity and rainfall against variables like number of cumulative cases, new daily cases and contamination rate to build their study model.

The study model and data analysis are well-performed, and although the authors found that temperature and relativity humidity influenced the COVID-19 dissemination, other well-known and important variables, such as social distancing, population testing, hand wash (Giordano et al., 2020) and rational use of face mask were not part of their study model (Feng et al., 2020) . Brazil is a continental country with large disparity between cities and regions, with massive differences from socioeconomic to human development. On the other hand, the governors of the state of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, among others, are reinforcing social distancing in their state (Wikipedia, 2020b) . This dispute was taken to the Supreme Court, which reinforced the authority of cities and states to define local measures of social distancing, quarantine, prohibition of activities and definition of essential services (Federal, 2020) .

The COVID-19 pandemic started in Wuhan, China and spread worldwide. The cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were the 2 first cities to report cases in Brazil, which is possibly explained by their importance in commercial aviation, responsible for almost 80% of the weekly international seats of the country, 62.27% and 17.1% respectively (based on data from November 2019 of the National Civil Aviation Agency of Brazil -ANAC) (Regis, 2020) . Since the cases started to spread in these cities, uncoordinated measures of social distancing were gradually implemented across the country, in despite of the divergences between the president and governors (Wikipedia, 2020a) , (Wikipedia, 2020b) .

Brasilia showed the first case in 7 th March and its history of the pandemic was marked by the trip of the Brazilian president to USA between 7 to 10 of March, where

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