  The cumulative number of confirmed infected individuals by the new
coronavirus outbreak until April 30th, 2020, is presented for the countries:
Belgium, Brazil, United Kingdom (UK), and United States of America (USA). After
an initial period with a low incidence of newly infected people, a power-law
growth of the number of confirmed cases is observed. For each country, a
distinct growth exponent is obtained. For Belgium, UK, and USA, countries with
a large number of infected people, after the power-law growth a distinct
behavior is obtained when approaching saturation. Brazil is still in the
power-law regime. Such updates of the data and projections corroborate recent
results regarding the power-law growth of the virus and their strong Distance
Correlation between some countries around the world. Furthermore, we show that
act in time is one of the most relevant non-pharmacological weapons that the
health organizations have in the battle against the COVID-19, infectious
disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus. We study how
changing the social distance and the number of daily tests to identify infected
asymptomatic individuals can interfere in the number of confirmed cases of
COVID-19 when applied in three distinct days, namely April 16th (early), April
30th (current), and May 14th (late). Results show that containment actions are
necessary to flatten the curves and should be applied as soon as possible.
