Effective containment explains sub-exponential growth in confirmed cases of recent COVID-19 outbreak in Mainland China

Benjamin F Maier; Dirk Brockmann

The universality of the scaling relation t µ with similar exponents µ is evidence that this aspect of the dynamics is determined by fundamental principles that are at work and robust with respect to variation of other parameters that typically shape the temporal evolution of epidemic processes. Three questions immediately arise, (i) what may be the reason for this functional dependency, (ii) are provinces other than Hubei mostly driven by export cases from Hubei and therefore follow a similar functional form in case counts as suggested by preliminary studies [10] [11] [12] , or, alternatively, (iii) is the scaling law a consequence of endogeneous and basic epidemiological processes and a consequence of a balance between transmission events and containment factors.