Systematic description of COVID-19 pandemic using exact SIR solutions and Gumbel distributions

Abstract

An epidemiological study of deaths is carried out in a dozen countries by analyzing the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. These countries are among those most affected by the first wave, i.e. where daily-death data series may closely resemble a solution of the basic SIR equations. The SIR equations are solved parametrically using the proper time as parameter. Some general properties of the SIR solutions are studied such as time-scaling and asymmetry. Additionally, we use approximations to the SIR solutions through Gumbel functions, which present a very similar behavior. The parameters of the SIR model and the Gumbel function are extracted from the data and compared for the different countries. It is found that ten of the selected countries are very well described by the solutions of the SIR model, with a basic reproduction number between 3 and 8.