A random walk Monte Carlo simulation study of COVID-19-like infection spread

Recent analysis of early COVID-19 data from China showed that the number of confirmed cases followed a subexponential power-law increase, with a growth exponent of around 2.2 (Maier and Brockmann, 2020). The power-law behavior was attributed to a combination of effective containment and mitigation measures employed as well as behavioral changes by the population. In this work, we report a random walk Monte Carlo simulation study of proximity-based infection spread. Control interventions such as lockdown measures and mobility restrictions are incorporated in the simulations through a single parameter, the size of each step in the random walk process. The step size l is taken to be a multiple of , which is the average separation between individuals. Three temporal growth regimes (quadratic, intermediate power-law and exponential) are shown to emerge naturally from our simulations. For l = , we get intermediate power-law growth exponents that are in general agreement with available data from China. On the other hand, we obtain a quadratic growth for smaller step sizes l less than or similar to /2, while for large l the growth is found to be exponential. We further performed a comparative case study of early fatality data (under varying levels of lockdown conditions) from three other countries, India, Brazil and South Africa. We show that reasonable agreement with these data can be obtained by incorporating small-world-like connections in our simulations. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The recent analysis of early COVID-19 data from China revealed a subexponential power-law increase in confirmed cases, with a growth exponent of around 2.2 attributed to effective containment measures and behavioral changes. A random walk Monte Carlo simulation study showed three temporal growth regimes, with reasonable agreement with early fatality data from India, Brazil, and South Africa achieved by incorporating small-world-like connections in the simulations.