One of the four genera within the Coronaviridae family is the Betacoronavirus genus, and among these viruses, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are found as the main exponents (Li, 2016; Lu, 2020; Paraskevis et al. 2020; Chen et al. 2020). SARS-CoV-2 was identified as a new virus whose infection was named 2019-nCoV or COVID-19 (Abd et al. 2020). The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the city of Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei (Grifoni et al. 2020). This new virus has spread rapidly from Wuhan to other areas of China and to more countries in the world (Fan et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2020; Singhal, 2020). A public health emergency was declared due to the number of positive cases and deaths by COVID-19, on January 30, 2020 and later, the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020a; 2020b) classified it as a pandemic. As of April 26th, 2020, a total of 2,804,796 confirmed total cases and 193,722 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported (WHO,2020c). Among the group of 20 countries with the highest number of cases reported by COVID-19 are China, Turkey, and Brazil. On April 17th, China increased the total number of deaths because it had not counted the people who died in their homes (WHO,2020c), while keeping quarantine and social distancing measures, among others.
To explain and predict the behavior of the current pandemic, SEIR and SIR epidemiological models are being applied. For example, the compartmentalized SEIR epidemiological model allows researchers to analyze the behavior of four states: susceptible to infection, exposed or latent, infected, and recovered (Grifoni et al. 2020).
Apart from these four states, this model estimates the reproductive number Ro (Fan et al. 2020;), which estimates the new infections that an infectious person will produce during infection, in a totally susceptible population in the absence of interventions (Yang et al. 2020). However, the results of the studies carried out using the SEIR and SIR models are very varied (Roda et al. 2020). One of the many causes of the variation in these results is attributed to the lack of reliable data from Wuhan before January 23 when the city was under quarantined as data confirmed in one day may have been subject to erroneous COVID-19 test results (Yang et al. 2020). In addition to this, there are studies that have shown that the estimation of Ro in the analysis of other epidemics has generated misinterpretations. Furthermore, Ro values change in different regions of the world (Ridenhour et al. 2014), therefore, this value cannot be considered to estimate the behavior of the pandemic in several countries simultaneously.
Probability was considered an empirical discipline before the end of the 19th century. For it to become a theory, it was necessary to develop proper axiomatization processes and their possible applications (Blanco, 2020; Koroliuk, 2015). In probability theory, the relationship between the frequency distribution of events and their probability is called probability distribution (Feynman et al. 1964). Among the phenomena of study of quantum mechanics is the analysis of quantum states, which have been possible to differentiate from probability distributions (Chernega et al. 2017; 2019).
Studies developed within the framework of probability theory in epidemiology have revealed the capacity of these methodologies to make annual predictions of the number of people infected by malaria and dengue in Colombia which have achieved accuracy percentages close to 100% (Rodríguez, 2010; 2019; Rodríguez et al, 2018). Based on this line of research, the design of a new methodology based on probability theory is proposed, capable of predicting the spatial-temporal dynamics of the total number of subjects deceased by COVID-19 in China, Turkey, and Brazil. Additionally, sub-spaces of eight consecutive days were established, whose probability ranges allow to compare changes in the dynamics of the total number of deaths from COVID-19 for each of these countries.