Recent work showed that the initial coronavirus disease 2019 ( COVID-19 ) data from China followed a subexponential power-law increase in the number of confirmed cases. This was attributed to a combination of effective containment and mitigation measures employed as well as behaviorial changes by the population. In view of this, we performed a Monte Carlo random walk study to better understand  infectious disease spread, particularly under restrictions. Our model is found to be rather robust and reproduces the observed power-law growth without relying on any external parameters. Three growth regimes (quadratic, power-law and exponential) emerge naturally from our simulations , which suggest that the  containment of the disease within China was close to the quadratic limit and could not have been significantly improved upon. Reasonable agreement with available data is attained by incorporating small-world-like connections in the simulations. The prescribed model and its generalizations might be useful for future strategies in the midst of the present pandemic.
Recent work showed that the initial COVID-19 data from China followed a subexponential power-law increase in the number of confirmed cases. This was attributed to a combination of effective containment and mitigation measures employed as well as behaviorial changes by the population. In view of this, we performed a Monte Carlo random walk study to better understand proximity-based infectious disease spread, particularly under restrictions. Our model is found to be rather robust and reproduces the observed power-law growth without relying on any external parameters. Three growth regimes (quadratic, power-law and exponential) emerge naturally from our simulations . These results suggest that the early containment of the disease within China was close to optimal and could not have been significantly improved upon. We show that reasonable agreement with other data can be attained by incorporating small-world-like connections in the simulations. The prescribed model and its generalizations might be useful for future strategies in the midst of the present pandemic.
D
coronavirus disease 2019 (
D
)
A
proximity-based
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, which
. These results
A
early
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the quadratic limit
optimal
R
Reasonable agreement with available data is
We show that reasonable agreement with other data can be