COVID-19 Infectious Progression Based On Viral Load
Salma Afifah , Mochamad Apri

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung 40132, Indonesia

Abstract

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new variant of the virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-20). According to research, more than 90% of infected individuals can spread the disease when the number of viruses in the host body reaches &#8805-1x10^5 RNA copies per mL [1]. Later, another study showed that the virus might spread about 5-6 days before the individual showed the first symptoms [2]. This fact suggests that someone who has been infected with the virus but is not aware of it can easily transmit the virus to others. Therefore, in this work, a mathematical model that describes the spread of COVID-19 that considers the number of viruses in the body is introduced by adjusting the SEIR model. In our model, the infectious people are divided into I_1 which represents the populations that can spread the virus before showing symptoms, and I_2 which represents the populations that are capable of spreading the virus after showing a symptom. In addition, we also consider that some of the infectious people are quarantined. The model is then analyzed to investigate the stability of the equilibrium points, the basic reproduction number (R_0), and finally numerical simulations are performed. From our result, we find that controlling the rate of transmission, and the quarantined (or isolated) proportion of infectious people who have shown symptoms, are important to suppress the spread of the disease.

Keywords: COVID-19, viruses, Basic Reproduction Number, quarantine.

Topic: Minisymposia Differential Equations