A Novel Fractional-Order Discrete SIR Model for Predicting COVID-19 Behavior

Abstract

During the broadcast of Coronavirus across the globe, many mathematicians made several mathematical models. This was, of course, in order to understand the forecast and behavior of this epidemic’s spread precisely. Nevertheless, due to the lack of much information about it, the application of many models has become difficult in reality and sometimes impossible, unlike the simple SIR model. In this work, a simple, novel fractional-order discrete model is proposed in order to study the behavior of the COVID-19 epidemic. Such a model has shown its ability to adapt to the periodic change in the number of infections. The existence and uniqueness of the solution for the proposed model are examined with the help of the Picard Lindelöf method. Some theoretical results are established in view of the connection between the stability of the fixed points of this model and the basic reproduction number. Several numerical simulations are performed to verify the gained results.

Keywords

• SIR model
• fractional-order discrete operators
• stability
• existence and uniqueness
• Picard Lindelöf method
• basic reproduction number