How relevant is the decision of containment measures against COVID-19 applied ahead of time?

The cumulative number of confirmed infected individuals by the new coronavirus outbreak until April 30th, 2020, is presented for the countries: Belgium, Brazil, United Kingdom (UK), and the United States of America (USA). After an initial period with a low incidence of newly infected people, a power-law growth of the number of confirmed cases is observed. For each country, a distinct growth exponent is obtained. For Belgium, UK, and USA, countries with a large number of infected people, after the powerlaw growth, a distinct behavior is obtained when approaching saturation. Brazil is still in the power-law regime. Such updates of the data and projections corroborate recent results regarding the power-law growth of the virus and their strong Distance Correlation between some countries around the world. Furthermore, we show that act in time is one of the most relevant non-pharmacological weapons that the health organizations have in the battle against the COVID-19, infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus. We study how changing the social distance and the number of daily tests to identify infected asymptomatic individuals can interfere in the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 when applied in three distinct days, namely April 16th (early), April 30th (current), and May 14th (late). Results show that containment actions are necessary to flatten the curves and should be applied as soon as possible. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.