A Mass-Conservation Model for Stability Analysis and Finite-Time Estimation of Spread of COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic has significantly impacted people throughout the United States and the World. While it was initially believed the virus was transmitted from animal to human, person-to-person transmission is now recognized as the main source of community spread. This article integrates data into physics-based models to analyze stability of the rapid COVID-19 growth and to obtain a data-driven model for spread dynamics among the human population. The proposed mass-conservation model is used to learn the parameters of pandemic growth and to predict the growth of total cases, deaths, and recoveries over a finite future time horizon. The proposed finite-time prediction model is validated by finite-time estimation of the total numbers of infected cases, deaths, and recoveries in the United States from March 12, 2020 to December 9, 2020.