Chaotic model for COVID-19 growth factor

PURPOSE: The new COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 initiated in the world a large quarantine, due to the exponential capacity of the virus in spreading from human contact. In the present work, the dynamics of such spreading was evaluated by the analysis of the growth factor of the disease. METHOD: It was applied the space phase of the time series, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) of the series, and the fractal dimension of the space phase. RESULTS: It was possible to notice a strange attractor in the space phase of the growth factor indicating that the process is a deterministic chaos. The value of the alpha coefficient by DFA showed to be less than 0.5, characteristic of anti-persistent long-range memory, in which large events alternate with small events, and vice-versa. The fractal dimension of the phase space set was a fractal number, between 1 and 2, another indicator that the growth factor of the disease is not random. CONCLUSION: This global analysis is pointing that the spread of COVID-19 is a deterministic chaos, with long-range memory. Understanding such dynamics may help the control of this disease.