  The initial surge of the COVID-19 pandemic hit Guatemala on March 2020. On a
country scale, the epidemic has undergone a fairly well-known and
distinguishable initial phase, reaching its peak on mid July 2020. However, the
detailed picture is more involved and reflects inter-regional variations in the
epidemic dynamics, presumably grounded on socio-demographic, connectivity, and
human mobility factors. Classifying the regional epidemic curves and
identifying the major hubs of regional COVID-19 spread can contribute towards
defining an evidence-based risk map for future outbreaks of infectious diseases
with similar transmissibility properties. In this work, we make a regional wave
decomposition of the initial epidemic phase registered in Guatemala, and we use
the Richards phenomenological model alongside multivariate ordination
techniques of its estimated model parameters to draw a countrywide picture of
the first epidemiological wave. By exploring similarities in the model space
parameters, we traced routes for the disease spread across the country. We
evaluated how well the proposed classification can help to define a regional
risk hierarchy comprising early stage focal points, major hubs, and secondary
regions of epidemic progression.
