Chaotic and Quasi-periodic Regimes in the Covid-19 Mortality Data

Abstract

It has been reported by World Health Organization (WHO) that the Covid-19 epidemic due to the Sar Cov-2 virus, which started in China and affected the whole world, caused the death of approximately six million people over three years. Global disasters such as pandemics not only cause deaths but also bring other global catastrophic problems. Therefore, governments need to perform very serious strategic operations to prevent both infection and death. It is accepted that even if there are vaccines developed against the virus, it will never be possible to predict very complex spread dynamics and reach a spread pattern due to new variants and other parameters. In the present study, four countries: Türkiye, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom have been selected since they exhibit similar characteristics in terms of the pandemic’s onset date, wave patterns, measures taken against the outbreak, and the vaccines used. Additionally, they are all located on the same continent. For these reasons, the three-year Covid-19 data of these countries were analyzed. Detailed chaotic attractors analyses were performed for each country and Lyapunov exponents were obtained. We showed that the three-year times series is chaotic for the chosen countries. In this sense, our results are compatible with the results of the Covid-19 analysis results in the literature. However, unlike previous Covid-19 studies, we also found out that there are chaotic, periodic, or quasi-periodic sub-series within these chaotic time series. The obtained results are of great importance in terms of revealing the details of the dynamics of the pandemic.