Anticipating the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

Taranjot Kaur; Sukanta Sarkar; Sourangsu Chowdhury; Sudipta Kumar Sinha; Mohit Kumar Jolly; Partha Sharathi Dutta

We obtain the data sets of the cumulative number of the COVID-19 cases from the date of reporting of the first affected person up to 25 March, 2020 each for India, China, South Korea, the United States (US), Singapore, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom (UK) and Spain (for the data source see Materials and Methods section). Figure 1 depicts the growth curve of the fraction of the affected population in each of these countries. Interestingly, it is noted that the growth curve of the confirmed cases follows a slow increment for around initial 20-25 days, which can be interpreted as a time window to control the epidemic promptly and effectively. Since human to human contact is a leading transmitter of the disease, therefore, by-passing a certain threshold of infected cases, the growth curve shows an increasing slope and finally depicts a sudden large shift/transition in the fraction of affected populations (Fig. 1 ) [25] . It is important to note that the growth in number of cases for China and South Korea, the countries which initiated public monitoring/social distancing actions relatively earlier as compared to the other countries, saturates after nearly 3-4 weeks from the initiation of the lockdown. The shift of the COVID-19 from a low-burden to a high-burden state can be associated with the phenomenon of critical . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.