R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Sep 22;8(9):211379. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211379. eCollection 2021 Sep.
ABSTRACT
The temporal evolution of second and subsequent waves of epidemics such as Covid-19 is investigated. Analytic expressions for the peak time and asymptotic behaviours, early doubling time, late half decay time, and a half-early peak law, characterizing the dynamical evolution of number of cases and fatalities, are derived, where the pandemic evolution exhibiting multiple waves is described by the semi-time SIR model. The asymmetry of the epidemic wave and its exponential tail are affected by the initial conditions, a feature that has no analogue in the all-time SIR model. Our analysis reveals that the immunity is very strongly increasing in several countries during the second Covid-19 wave. Wave-specific SIR parameters describing infection and recovery rates we find to behave in a similar fashion. Still, an apparently moderate change of their ratio can have significant consequences. As we show, the probability of an additional wave is however low in several countries due to the fraction of immune inhabitants at the end of the second wave, irrespective of the ongoing vaccination efforts. We compare with alternate approaches and data available at the time of submission. Most recent data serves to demonstrate the successful forecast and high accuracy of the SIR model in predicting the evolution of pandemic outbreaks as long as the assumption underlying our analysis, an unchanged situation of the distribution of variants of concern and the fatality fraction, do not change dramatically during a wave. With the rise of the α variant at the time of submission the second wave did not terminate in some countries, giving rise to a superposition of waves that is not treated by the present contribution.
PMID:34567593 | PMC:PMC8456141 | DOI:10.1098/rsos.211379
