paper

Strong correlations between power-law growth of COVID-19 in four continents and the inefficiency of soft quarantine strategies

arXiv:2004.00044 · doi:10.1063/5.0009454

Abstract

In this work we analyse the growth of the cumulative number of confirmed infected cases by the COVID-19 until March 27th, 2020, from countries of Asia, Europe, North and South America. Our results show (i) that power-law growth is observed for all countries; (ii) by using the distance correlation, that the power-law curves between countries are statistically highly correlated, suggesting the universality of such curves around the World; and (iii) that soft quarantine strategies are inefficient to flatten the growth curves. Furthermore, we present a model and strategies which allow the government to reach the flattening of the power-law curves. We found that, besides the social distance of individuals, of well known relevance, the strategy of identifying and isolating infected individuals in a large daily rate can help to flatten the power-laws. These are essentially the strategies used in the Republic of Korea. The high correlation between the power-law curves of different countries strongly indicate that the government containment measures can be applied with success around the whole World. These measures must be scathing and applied as soon as possible.

In this version we replotted Figures 3 and 4 with more appropriated parameter values, improved the discussions about the definition of parameters and initial conditions in Appendix B, and added new references

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