SIMPLICITY FROM COMPLEXITY: ON THE SIMPLE AMPLITUDE DYNAMICS UNDERLYING COVID-19 OUTBREAKS IN CHINA
T.D. Frank
Abstract
COVID-19 confronts societies and individuals with unprecedented challenges. It is advocated that complex systems theory, in general, and synergetics, in particular, provide a valuable and comprehensive repertoire of tools and concepts such as the concept of amplitude equations and order parameters to study the spread of COVID-19 in human populations. Specifically, within the framework of SIR and SEIR compartment models COVID-19 trajectories are described in terms of amplitude equations and order parameters. By plotting simulated and semi-empirical COVID-19 case trajectories it is shown that the initial epidemics in China, in general, and Wuhan city, in particular, during the first quarter of the year 2020 followed relatively simple amplitude dynamics in SIR and SEIR model state spaces describing interaction classes of individuals. The amplitudes evolve along certain paths or directions determined by order parameters that are well known to exist in complex systems. In summary, the present work highlights that COVID-19 outbreaks are constrained by general principles that hold for a broad class of phenomena in living and non-living systems.