Analysing and comparing the COVID-19 data: The closed cases of Hubei and South Korea, the dark March in Europe, the beginning of the outbreak in South America

Stefano De Leo; Gabriel Gulak Maia; Leonardo Solidoro

The paper is divided as follows: In the next section, we analyse the spreading rate of COVID-19 as a function of the confirmed cases. The TCCpM curves are not linear over long time intervals (weeks and months), but sections of it spanned over shorter periods can be approximated so. In this paper, we have chosen an interval of 5 days. By studying how the angular coefficient of these straight (called for simplicity of presentation the α factor) changes with the number of confirmed people, we have an insight on how COVID-19 spreads over the different European countries for a given TCCpM value. In section 3, we numerically fit progressively increasing portions of the available data on the TCCpM to a mathematical model, checking how our predictions of the model's fitting parameters change with time as more data becomes available. The values of the parameters show an oscillatory behaviour which eventually reaches stability. The stable values can then be used in the model to forecast the development of the pandemic itself. Section 4 looks more closely at the Italian case by studying how the virus spread over 4 different Italian regions. Section 5 analyses the beginning of the outbreak in South America. In the final Section, we draw our conclusions.