MOSCOW, May 26. /TASS/. Researchers from China's Lanzhou University have established that the areas with an average temperature of 5-15 degrees Celsius account for over half of the novel coronavirus cases across the globe, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

Researches have studied correlation between environmental parameters and the global spread of coronavirus. Their work is based on 3.75 million coronavirus cases reported between January 21 and May 6 in 185 countries of the globe. As a result, they established that 60% of the COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the regions with moderate air temperatures between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius. The lead author of the study, Huang Zhongwei stressed that the researches cannot rely on the conjecture that the spread of coronavirus will stop with an increase in the temperature.

Besides, they found out that 73.8% of the infected persons lived in the regions with absolute humidity of three to ten grams per cubic meter. The experts note in their work that they are considering only natural factors influencing the spread of the virus, but other factors exist as well. The research was published in the Science of The Total Environment magazine.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus — named COVID-19 by the WHO — have been reported in every corner of the globe.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 5,601,800 people have been infected worldwide and more than 348,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 2,381,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.