Chaos theory applied to the outbreak of Covid-19: an ancillary approach to decision-making in pandemic context

Sylvain Mangiarotti; Marisa Peyre; Yan Zhang; Mireille Huc; Francois Roger; Yann Kerr

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.20051441 doi: medRxiv preprint 5 Numerous studies have been based on chaos theory to study epidemiological behaviours [15] [16] [17] but a global modelling approach per se has rarely been applied to biological systems. The first replicable application was in ecology [18] . In epidemiology, it enabled to obtain an interpretable model for the epidemic of Bombay bubonic plague (1896-1911) by extracting the couplings between the human epidemic and the epizootics of two species of rats. Although obtained from 5 observational time series without strong a priori model structure, it was found possible in the latter case to give an interpretation to all the model's terms [19] . A model was also obtained for the West Africa epidemic of Ebola Virus Disease (2013) (2014) (2015) (2016) coupling the two observed variables made available with a regular sampling: the cumulated number of infected cases and deaths [20] . In the present study, this modelling approach is used to model the current Covid-19 10 epidemic in Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) and then to produce scenarios for fourteen other countries where the disease was introduced later and spread locally.