A New Incommensurate Fractional-Order Discrete COVID-19 Model with Vaccinated Individuals Compartment

Abstract

Fractional-order systems have proved to be accurate in describing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by virtue of their capability to include the memory effects into the system dynamics. This manuscript presents a novel fractional discrete-time COVID-19 model that includes the number of vaccinated individuals as an additional state variable in the system equations. The paper shows that the proposed compartment model, described by difference equations, has two fixed points, i.e., a disease-free fixed point and an epidemic fixed point. A new theorem is proven which highlights that the pandemic disappears when an inequality involving the percentage of the population in quarantine is satisfied. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to show that the proposed incommensurate fractional-order model is effective in describing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.