Elementary time-delay dynamics of COVID-19 disease

An elementary model of COVID-19 dynamics—based on time-delay differential equations with a step-like survival function—is shown to be in good agreement with data from China and South Korea. The time-delal approach overcomes the major limitation of standard Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) models based on ordinary differential equations, namely their inability to predict the observed curve of infected individuals as a function of time. The model is also applied to countries where the epidemic is in earlier stages, such as Italy and Spain, to obtain estimates of the total number of cases and peak number of infected people that might be observed.