Citation: Rasul, A.; Balzter, H. The Role of Climate in the Spread of COVID-19 in Different Latitudes across the World. COVID 2022, 2, 1183–1192. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/covid2090085 Academic Editor: Giuseppe Novelli Received: 14 July 2022 Accepted: 17 August 2022 Published: 23 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Brief Report The Role of Climate in the Spread of COVID-19 in Different Latitudes across the World Azad Rasul 1, * and Heiko Balzter 2,3 1 Department of Geography, Soran University, Soran, Erbil 44008, Iraq 2 Centre for Landscape and Climate Research, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK 3 National Centre for Earth Observation, University of Leicester, Space Park Leicester, 92 Corporation Road, Leicester LE4 5SP, UK * Correspondence: azad.rasul@soran.edu.iq Abstract: Most transmittable diseases appear in a specific season and the effect of climate on COVID-19 is of special interest. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between climatic variables and the R 0 of COVID-19 cases in a list of areas in different latitudes around the world. The daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 and climatic data of each area per day from January 2020 to March 2021 were utilized in the study. The GWR and MLR methods were used to identify the relationship between the R 0 of COVID-19 cases and climatic variables. The MLR results showed a significant (p-value < 0.05) weak inverse relationship between the R 0 of COVID-19 cases and wind speed, but a positive significant (p-value < 0.01) relationship with precipitation. This implies that lower COVID-19 cases were recorded with high wind speed and low precipitation. Based on GWR, the R 0 of COVID-19 infection assessed against air temperature, rh, and precipitation was found to be statistically significant using the Monte Carlo p-value test, and the effect of climatic variables on COVID-19 infection appears to vary geographically. However, besides climatic variables, many socioeconomic factors could influence the virus’s transmission and will need to be considered in future studies. Keywords: coronavirus; geographically weighted regression (GWR); global; relationship; SARS-CoV2 1. Introduction The coronavirus disease COVID-19 emerged in China between the end of 2019 and early 2020. Since then it has rapidly spread to other countries around the world, and the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic [1,2]. The number of confirmed cases and casualties of SARS-CoV2 has exceeded the number of SARS-CoV1 and MERS-CoV casualties [3]. Most transmittable diseases appear in a specific season; for instance, influenza is not readily transmitted in hot and humid situations and shows seasonality in the regions with a temperate and climate where the peak of infections happens during winter [1,4]. Likewise, SARS-CoV1 and MERS-CoV also showed seasonal patterns and correlations with temperature. The peak of the first occurred during the spring while the second was transmitted in warm climates during spring and summer seasons [5]. People stay indoors more in winter, which can assist the spread of diseases; and vitamin D levels in people tend to drop in winter, which may reduce their immunity [6]. These may be among the reasons for the more rapid spread of infectious diseases in winter. R naught or zero (R 0 ) refers to the reproduction number or the effective reproduction number (R e ) of the virus. It describes the average number of people each infected person will infect where there is no pre-existing immunity in the community, based on three factors: the duration, the likelihood of infection and the frequency of contact [7]. R 0 is an exponent COVID 2022, 2, 1183–1192. https://doi.org/10.3390/covid2090085 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/covid