id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-284810-fs5rx07q	Blasius, Bernd	Power-law distribution in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases	2020-09-17		.txt	text/plain	7590	449	58	To test this hypothesis, we use empirical data 14 to compute the country-level distribution, P, of confirmed COVID-19 cases, n, at the end of March 2020 worldwide and find that it is closely approximated by a truncated power-law, 4, 38 Here, we provide a conceptual dual-scale model that explains the emergence of the power-law distribution by the "superposition" of two concurrent processes: large-scale spread of the virus between countries and small-scale snowballing of case numbers within each country. By combining real world data, modeling, and numerical simulations, we make the case that the distribution of epidemic prevalence, and possibly that of spreading processes in general, might follow universal rules. A straightforward calculation shows that the combination of the two exponential processes generically yields a truncated power-law distribution in the number of cases in countries: Consider an epidemic outbreak that started (the first case reported in a country) at time t = 0.	./cache/cord-284810-fs5rx07q.txt	./txt/cord-284810-fs5rx07q.txt