The Chaotic Behavior of the Spread of Infection During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States and Globally

Nabin Sapkota; Waldemar Karwowski; Mohammad Reza Davahli; Awad Al-Juaid; Redha Taiar; Atsuo Murata; Grzegorz Wrobel; Tadeusz Marek

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3085240

The Chaotic Behavior of the Spread of Infection During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States and Globally

IEEE Access. 2021 Jun 2:9:80692-80702. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3085240. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Nabin Sapkota¹, Waldemar Karwowski², Mohammad Reza Davahli², Awad Al-Juaid³, Redha Taiar⁴, Atsuo Murata⁵, Grzegorz Wrobel⁶, Tadeusz Marek⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Engineering TechnologyNorthwestern State University of Louisiana Natchitoches LA 71459 USA.
² Department of Industrial Engineering and Management SystemsUniversity of Central Florida Orlando FL 32816 USA.
³ Industrial Engineering DepartmentTaif University Taif 26571 Saudi Arabia.
⁴ MATériaux et Ingénierie Mécanique (MATIM)Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne 51100 Reims France.
⁵ Department of Intelligent Mechanical SystemsGraduate School of Natural Science and TechnologyOkayama University Okayama 700-8530 Japan.
⁶ Department of Logistics and Process EngineeringUniversity of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów 35-225 Rzeszów Poland.
⁷ Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and NeuroergonomicsInstitute of Applied Psychology, Jagiellonian University 31-007 Kraków Poland.

Abstract

In December 2019, China announced the breakout of a new virus identified as coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), which soon grew exponentially and resulted in a global pandemic. Despite strict actions to mitigate the spread of the virus in various countries, COVID-19 resulted in a significant loss of human life in 2020 and early 2021. To better understand the dynamics of the spread of COVID-19, evidence of its chaotic behavior in the US and globally was evaluated. A 0-1 test was used to analyze the time-series data of confirmed daily COVID-19 cases from 1/22/2020 to 12/13/2020. The results show that the behavior of the COVID-19 pandemic was chaotic in 55% of the investigated countries. Although the time-series data for the entire US was not chaotic, 39% of individual states displayed chaotic infection spread behavior based on the reported daily cases. Overall, there is evidence of chaotic behavior of the spread of COVID-19 infection worldwide, which adds to the difficulty in controlling and preventing the current pandemic.

Keywords: 0–1 test; COVID-19 pandemic; Chaotic behavior; spread of infections.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Research Grant from the Taif University Researchers Supporting Project, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia, under Grant TURSP-2020/229.