Abstract
PurposeThe new COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 initiated in the world a large quarantine, due to the exponential capacity of the virus in spreading from human contact. In the present work, the dynamics of such spreading was evaluated by the analysis of the growth factor of the disease.MethodIt was applied the space phase of the time series, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) of the series, and the fractal dimension of the space phase.ResultsIt was possible to notice a strange attractor in the space phase of the growth factor indicating that the process is a deterministic chaos. The value of the alpha coefficient by DFA showed to be less than 0.5, characteristic of anti-persistent long-range memory, in which large events alternate with small events, and vice-versa. The fractal dimension of the phase space set was a fractal number, between 1 and 2, another indicator that the growth factor of the disease is not random.ConclusionThis global analysis is pointing that the spread of COVID-19 is a deterministic chaos, with long-range memory. Understanding such dynamics may help the control of this disease.
Highlights
Some processes in nature can be described as being nonlinear, which means that just small changes in the starting point can lead to enormous consequences
Between 0 and 1, it is a sign of a decline, and constantly above 1 is a sign of exponential growth. This series was submitted to the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA)
The detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) of the time series resulted in an alpha coefficient (α) of 0.27957 and a dimension of 2.7204
Summary
Some processes in nature can be described as being nonlinear, which means that just small changes in the starting point can lead to enormous consequences. This is the case of the new infections by SARS-CoV-2 and the emergence of COVID-19 in the world. Many countries in the world started the suppression of the virus by quarantine, with social distance of healthy individuals and isolation of the elders or those with clinical symptoms such as fever. If the governments do not act in suppression, but only in mitigation, the number of deaths would reach thousands in some countries and millions in the world (Ferguson et al 2020)
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