Spatiotemporal and meteorological relationships in dengue transmission in the Dominican Republic, 2015-2019

Abstract

Dengue has broadened its global distribution substantially in the past two decades, and many endemic areas are experiencing increases in incidence. The Dominican Republic recently experienced its two largest outbreaks to date with 16,836 reported cases in 2015 and 20,123 reported cases in 2019. With continued increases in dengue transmission, developing tools to better prepare healthcare systems and mosquito control agencies is of critical importance. Before such tools can be developed, however, we must first better understand potential drivers of dengue transmission. To that end, we focus in this paper on determining relationships between climate variables and dengue transmission with an emphasis on eight provinces and the capital city of the Dominican Republic in the period 2015-2019. We present summary statistics for dengue cases, temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity in this period, and we conduct an analysis of correlated lags between climate variables and dengue cases as well as correlated lags among dengue cases in each of the nine locations. We find that the southwestern province of Barahona had the largest dengue incidence in both 2015 and 2019. Among all climate variables considered, lags between relative humidity variables and dengue cases were the most frequently correlated. We found that most locations had significant correlations with cases in other locations at lags of zero weeks. These results can be used to improve predictive models of dengue transmission in the country.