Renormalization Group Approach to Pandemics: The COVID-19 Case

Abstract

We investigate the spreading dynamics of infected cases for SARS-2013 and COVID-19 epidemics for different regions of the world, in terms of the renormalization group language. The latter provides an alternative way to describe the underlying dynamics of disease spread. This allows us to introduce important quantities, for a given disease, such as the slope of the beta function at fixed points and the time scale of the epidemic spread inflection point. We discover that for COVID-19 the epidemic slope is of order one inverse week and the inflection point occurs roughly 4 weeks after the outbreak. We use these results to attempt long term estimates for the epidemic evolution in several regions of the world. The accuracy of the results vary depending on the epidemic stage for each region. We also provide a webpage where we daily update our analyses.