Figure 3
From: Differential responses of SARS-CoV-2 variants to environmental drivers during their selective sweeps
Impacts of temperature on variant transmission rates. Here we plot the residuals from linear regressions of \(R_t\) versus all of the non-climate spatial and temporal predictors against temperature, for the Alpha (a), Delta (b) and Omicron (c) variants respectively. After accounting for the non-climate-related variation in \(R_t\), we find that temperature had a significant impact on transmission rates during the Alpha variant sweep and, whilst a linear regression had a significant negative slope (supplementary figure 4), this is better described by an asymptotic model (red curve, likelihood-ratio test \(p < 0.001\)). We find no significant impact of temperature during either the Delta or Omicron variant sweeps (linear models, blue).
