An optimal control model for Covid-19 spread with impacts of vaccination and facemask

Ammar ElHassan; Yousef AbuHour; Ashraf Ahmad

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19848

An optimal control model for Covid-19 spread with impacts of vaccination and facemask

Heliyon. 2023 Sep 7;9(9):e19848. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19848. eCollection 2023 Sep.

Authors

Ammar ElHassan¹, Yousef AbuHour¹, Ashraf Ahmad¹

Affiliation

¹ Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Al-Jubaiha, Amman 11941, Amman, 1438, Jordan.

Abstract

A non-linear system of differential equations was used to explain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and a SEIQR model was developed and tested to provide insights into the spread of the pandemic. This article, which is related to the aforementioned work as well as other work covering variations of SIR models, Hermite Wavelets Transform, and also the Generalized Compartmental COVID-19 model, we develop a mathematical control model and apply it to represent optimal vaccination strategy against COVID-19 using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle and also factoring in the effect of facemasks on the spread of the virus. As background work, we analyze the mathematical epidemiology model with the facemask effect on both reproduction number and stability, we also analyze the difference between confirmed COVID-19 cases of the Quarantine class and anonymous cases of the Infectious class that is expected to recover. We also apply control theory to mine insights for effective virus spread prevention strategies. Our models are validated using Matlab mathematical model validation tools. Statistical tests against data from Jordan are used to validate our work including the modeling of the relation between the facemask effect and COVID-19 spread. Furthermore, the relation between control measure ξ, cost, and Infected cases is also studied.

Keywords: Compartmental model; Control model; Covid-19; Facemask; Hermite wavelets; Infected; Jordan; Ordinary differential equations; Quarantine; SEIQR; Spread rate; Vaccination.