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DOE OSTI · 1779296

Chaos, Percolation and the Coronavirus Spread

Bonasera, Aldo·Zhang, Suyalatu
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Abstract

The dynamics of the spreading of the COVID-19 virus has similar features to the turbulent flow, chaotic maps and other non-linear systems: a small seed grows exponentially and eventually saturates. Like in the percolation model, the virus is mostly dangerous if the probability of transmission (or the bond probability p in the percolation model) is high. This suggests a relation with the population density, ρ s , which must be higher than a certain value (ρ s > 1000 persons/km 2 ). A ‘seed’ implanted in such towns grows vigorously and affects nearby places at distance x. Thus, the spreading is governed by the ratio ρ = ρ s /x. Assuming a power law dependence τ of the number of positives to the virus N + from ρ, we find τ = 0.55, 0.75 and 0.96 for S.Korea, Italy and China respectively.

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73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICSCOVID 19SARSchaospercolationturbulent mixing

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Bonasera, Aldo, Zhang, Suyalatu. 2020-04-30. Chaos, Percolation and the Coronavirus Spread. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.00171

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