Mathematical modeling and analysis of COVID-19: A study of new variant Omicron

• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.127452
• Publication Date: 2022-04-26T15:42:20Z
• Authors: Muhammad Altaf Khan; Abdon Atangana
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences; Article; 3. Good health

We construct a new mathematical model to better understand the novel coronavirus (omicron variant). We briefly present the modeling of COVID-19 with the omicron variant and present their mathematical results. We study that the Omicron model is locally asymptotically stable if the basic reproduction number R 0 < 1 , while for R 0 ≤ 1 , the model at the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable. We extend the model to the second-order differential equations to study the possible occurrence of the layers(waves). We then extend the model to a fractional stochastic version and studied its numerical results. The real data for the period ranging from November 1, 2021, to January 23, 2022, from South Africa are considered to obtain the realistic values of the model parameters. The basic reproduction number for the suggested data is found to be approximate R 0 ≈ 2 . 1107 which is very close to the actual basic reproduction in South Africa. We perform the global sensitivity analysis using the PRCC method to investigate the most influential parameters that increase or decrease R 0 . We use the new numerical scheme recently reported for the solution of piecewise fractional differential equations to present the numerical simulation of the model. Some graphical results for the model with sensitive parameters are given which indicate that the infection in the population can be minimized by following the recommendations of the world health organizations (WHO), such as social distances, using facemasks, washing hands, avoiding gathering, etc.