We propose a mechanism explaining the approximately linear growth of Covid19 world total cases as well as the slow linear decrease of the daily new cases (and daily deaths) observed (in average) in USA and Italy. In our explanation, we regard a given population (the whole world or a single nation) as composed by many sub-clusters which, after lockdown, evolve essentially independently. The interaction is modeled by the fact that the outbreak time of the epidemic in a sub-cluster is a random variable with probability density slowly varying in time. The explanation is independent of the law according to which the epidemic evolves in the single sub cluster.
We present an epidemic model capable of describing key features of the Covid-19 pandemic. While capturing several qualitative properties of the virus spreading, it allows to compute the basic reproduction number, the number of deaths due to the virus and various other statistics. Numerical integrations are used to illustrate the adherence of the evolutions described by the model to specific well known real features of the present pandemic. In particular, this model is consistent with the well known relevance of quarantine, shows the dramatic role of care houses and accounts for the increase in the death toll when spatial movements are not constrained.
Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13362-020-00090-4) contains supplementary material.