Modeling and analysis of the dynamics of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) with Caputo fractional derivative

Abstract

The new emerged infectious disease that is known the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is a high contagious viral infection that started in December 2019 in China city Wuhan and spread very fast to the rest of the world. This infection caused million of infected cases globally and still pose an alarming situation for human lives. Pakistan in Asian countries is considered the third country with higher number of cases of coronavirus with more than 200,000. Recently, many mathematical models have been considered to better understand the coronavirus infection. Most of these models are based on classical integer-order derivative which can not capture the fading memory and crossover behavior found in many biological phenomena. Therefore, we study the coronavirus disease in this paper by exploring the dynamics of COVID-19 infection using the non-integer Caputo derivative. In the absence of vaccine or therapy, the role of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) is examined on the dynamics of theCOVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan. First, we construct the model in integer sense and then apply the fractional operator to have a generalized model. The generalized model is then used to present the detailed theoretical results. We investigate the stability of the model for the case of fractional model using a nonlinear fractional Lyapunov function of Goh-Voltera type. Furthermore, we estimate the values of parameters with the help of least square curve fitting tool for the COVID-19 data recorded in Pakistan since March 1 till June 30, 2020 and show that our considered model give an accurate prediction to the real COVID-19 statistical cases. Finally, numerical simulations are presented using estimated parameters for various values of the fractional order of the Caputo derivative. From the simulation results it is found that the fractional order provides more insights about the disease dynamics.