Development of an Assessment Method for Investigating the Impact of Climate and Urban Parameters in Confirmed Cases of COVID-19: A New Challenge in Sustainable Development

Abstract

Sustainable development has been a controversial global topic, and as a complex concept in recent years, it plays a key role in creating a favorable future for societies. Meanwhile, there are several problems in the process of implementing this approach, like epidemic diseases. Hence, in this study, the impact of climate and urban factors on confirmed cases of COVID-19 (a new type of coronavirus) with the trend and multivariate linear regression (MLR) has been investigated to propose a more accurate prediction model. For this propose, some important climate parameters, including daily average temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, in addition to urban parameters such as population density, were considered, and their impacts on confirmed cases of COVID-19 were analyzed. The analysis was performed for three case studies in Italy, and the application of the proposed method has been investigated. The impacts of parameters have been considered with a delay time from one to nine days to find out the most suitable combination. The result of the analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model and the impact of climate parameters on the trend of confirmed cases. The research hypothesis approved by the MLR model and the present assessment method could be applied by considering several variables that exhibit the exact delay of them to new confirmed cases of COVID-19.