Study of COVID-19 epidemiological evolution in India with a multi-wave SIR model

TL;DR

This paper models the multi-wave COVID-19 epidemic in India using a modified SIR model that incorporates oscillatory behavior and re-susceptibility, providing insights into the pandemic's complex dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-wave SIR model with a re-susceptibility component and analyzes its stability and oscillatory solutions specific to India's COVID-19 waves.

Findings

The model exhibits oscillatory solutions due to complex eigenvalues.

Re-susceptibility leads to sustained epidemic waves.

Numerical solutions match observed epidemiological patterns in India.

Abstract

The global pandemic due to the outbreak of COVID-19 ravages the whole world for more than two years in which all the countries are suffering a lot since December 2019. In order to control this ongoing waves of epidemiological infections, attempts have been made to understand the dynamics of this pandemic in deterministic approach with the help of several mathematical models. In this article characteristics of a multi-wave SIR model have been studied which successfully explains the features of this pandemic waves in India. Stability of this model has been studied by identifying the equilibrium points as well as by finding the eigen values of the corresponding Jacobian matrices. Complex eigen values are found which ultimately give rise to the oscillatory solutions for the three categories of populations, say, susceptible, infected and removed. In this model, a finite probability of the recovered people for becoming susceptible again is introduced which eventually lead to the oscillatory solution in other words. The set of differential equations has been solved numerically in order to obtain the variation for numbers of susceptible, infected and removed people with time. In this phenomenological study, finally an additional modification is made in order to explain the aperiodic oscillation which is found necessary to capture the feature of epidemiological waves particularly in India.