Age Dependent Epidemic Modeling of COVID-19 Outbreak in Kuwait, France, and Cameroon

Abstract

Revisiting the classical model by Ross and Kermack-McKendrick, the Susceptible–Infectious–Recovered (SIR) model used to formalize the COVID-19 epidemic, requires improvements which will be the subject of this article. The heterogeneity in the age of the populations concerned leads to considering models in age groups with specific susceptibilities, which makes the prediction problem more difficult. Basically, there are three age groups of interest which are, respectively, 0–19 years, 20–64 years, and >64 years, but in this article, we only consider two (20–64 years and >64 years) age groups because the group 0–19 years is widely seen as being less infected by the virus since this age group had a low infection rate throughout the pandemic era of this study, especially the countries under consideration. In this article, we proposed a new mathematical age-dependent (Susceptible–Infectious–Goneanewsusceptible–Recovered (SIGR)) model for the COVID-19 outbreak and performed some mathematical analyses by showing the positivity, boundedness, stability, existence, and uniqueness of the solution. We performed numerical simulations of the model with parameters from Kuwait, France, and Cameroon. We discuss the role of these different parameters used in the model; namely, vaccination on the epidemic dynamics. We open a new perspective of improving an age-dependent model and its application to observed data and parameters.

Keywords

• SIR model
• COVID-19
• age-dependent modeling
• demographic model
• epidemic model