Mathematical analysis of an age structured epidemic model with a quarantine class

Abstract

In this paper, an age structured epidemic Susceptible-Infected-Quarantined-Recovered-Infected (SIQRI) model is proposed, where we will focus on the role of individuals that leave their class of quarantine before being completely recovered and thus will participate again to the transmission of the disease. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions by studying the stability of both trivial and positive equilibria. In order to see the impact of the different model parameters like the relapse rate on the qualitative behavior of our system, we firstly, give the explicit expression of the epidemic reproduction number $R_{0}.$ This number is a combination of the classical epidemic reproduction number for the SIQR model and a new epidemic reproduction number corresponding to the individuals infected by a relapsed person from the R-class. It is shown that, if $R_{0}\leq 1$, the disease free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable and becomes unstable for $R_{0}>1$. Secondly, while $R_{0}>1$, a suitable Lyapunov functional is constructed to prove that the unique endemic equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable on some subset $\Omega_{0}.$