Modeling the influence of vaccination coverage on the dynamics of COVID‐19 pandemic with the effect of environmental contamination

Abstract

The emergence of COVID‐19 pandemic has been a major social as well as economic challenges around the globe. Infections from the infected surfaces have also been identified as drivers of COVID‐19 transmission, but most of the epidemic models do not include the effect of environmental contamination to account for the indirect transmission of the disease. The present study is devoted to the investigation of the effect of environmental contamination on the spread of the coronavirus pandemic by means of a mathematical model. We also consider the impact of vaccination coverage as an effective control measure against COVID‐19. The proposed model is analyzed to discuss the feasibility as well as stability of the disease‐free and endemic equilibria; an epidemic threshold in the form of basic reproduction number is obtained. Further, we incorporate the effect of seasonal periodic changes by letting the rate of direct transmission of disease as time dependent, and find sufficient conditions for the global attractivity of the positive periodic solution. We employ sophisticated techniques of sensitivity analysis to identify model parameters which significantly alter the epidemic threshold and the disease prevalence. We find that by enhancing the vaccination of the susceptible population and hospitalization of the symptomatic/asymptomatic individuals, the basic reproduction number can be lowered to a value less than unity. The findings show that the prevalence of disease can be potentially suppressed by increasing the vaccination of susceptible population, hospitalization of infected people and depletion of environmental contamination. Moreover, we observe that seasonal pattern in the disease transmission causes persistence of the pandemic in the population for a longer period.