THE CHALLENGES OF MEDICAL RESOURCE LIMITATIONS FOR TUBERCULOSIS UNDER THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF CO-INFECTION AND OPTIMAL CONTROL

Abstract

Currently, more than 600 million people worldwide are diagnosed with COVID-19, while the implication of Tuberculosis cannot be ignored. The combination of COVID-19 and Tuberculosis exacerbates the catastrophe, dealing a serious blow to the healthcare system. This paper addresses how to develop effective and reasonable programs to combat the spread of COVID-19 and Tuberculosis in the absence of Tuberculosis medical resources, as well as exploring the impact of medical resources on optimal control implementation. Therefore, a co-infection dynamic of COVID-19 and Tuberculosis is constructed and analyzed. In order to investigate approaches to mitigate the disease transmission, a comprehensive and integrated study including sensitivity analysis, optimal control design and cost-effectiveness analysis is then performed. The simulation results illustrate that, the combination of the three control measures effectively achieves a win-win result in economic and epidemiological terms. In addition, the impact of Tuberculosis medical resources is highlighted, and the study shows that an appropriate increase in the medical resource supply for Tuberculosis during optimal control can have a stronger inhibitory effect on co-infection. Finally, based on the actual data, the model is validated by fitting the cumulative confirmed case curves of the two diseases.