Does COVID-19 Behave as Lightning Strike?

ABSTRACT

Early stages of an epidemic are characterized by exponential growth in the number of infected cases, corresponding to the effective reproduction number greater than 1. After deliberate interventions in the disease transmission are introduced, the effective reproduction number should drop below 1. The number of active infections should follow the downward trend conditioned by the stringency of the measures and drop exponentially. The growth phase is in general of shorter duration than the decay phase. This asymmetry imposes itself as an aggravating factor onto common mathematical models used to capture the epidemic dynamics. To overcome aforementioned issue, in this paper, we compare the functional form of the epidemic dynamics with the analytical expression often found in the lightning research and standardization. Computational examples are given for different countries that kept track of the number of daily positive cases, recovered cases and deaths during the period of the first outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). © 2022 University of Split, FESB.