Before revision:  At present, no departure from this behavior can be seen, allowing tentative predictions to be made for the next 1-2 months. Contrary to the usual exponential growth, a quadratic growth is the result of control interventions. It can be explained by spreading on the periphery of a bulk structure, which can be geometrical or sociological nature .
After revision:  At present, no departure from this behavior can be motivated by peripheral growth when further spreading occurs only on the outskirts of an infected region. We also study numerical solutions of a simple epidemic model, where the spatial extend of the system is taken into account. To model the delayed onset outside China together with the early one in China within a single model with minimal assumptions, we adopt an initial condition of several hotspots, of which one reaches saturation much earlier than the others. At each site, quadratic growth commences when the local number of infections has reached a certain saturation level. The total number of deaths does then indeed follow a piecewise quadratic behavior .