COVID-19 epidemic: Power law spread and flattening of the curve

Mahendra K. Verma; Ali Asad; Soumyadeep Chatterjee

There is possibly another connection of COVID-19 epidemic with turbulence and critical phenomena. In early stages, the epidemic spreads via contacts between infected and susceptible individuals. However, once the epidemic has spread widely, then indirect transmissionscontacts with infected surfaces, public transport, airbegin to play an important role in the epidemic growth. Such transmissions are referred to as community spread or transmission. This is analogous to interactions among clusters of molecules in phase transition, and those among large fluid vortices in turbulence. Such interactions are responsible for the dynamic scaling in phase transition, and for the aforementioned turbulence diffusion [23, 24, [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] . Super spreading of COVID-19 and the powerlaw regime of I(t) may be connected to the above phenomena. Note however that community spread could also contribute in the exponential growth phase; the two exponential regimes in Fig. 1 may be due to these reasons. These issues need further exploration.