A reliable and competitive mathematical analysis of Ebola epidemic model

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss the dynamics of the spread of Ebola virus disease (EVD), a kind of fever commonly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever. It is rare but severe and is considered to be extremely dangerous. Ebola virus transmits to people through domestic and wild animals, called transmitting agents, and then spreads into the human population through close and direct contact among individuals. To study the dynamics and to illustrate the stability pattern of Ebola virus in human population, we have developed an SEIR type model consisting of coupled nonlinear differential equations. These equations provide a good tool to discuss the mode of impact of Ebola virus on the human population through domestic and wild animals. We first formulate the proposed model and obtain the value of threshold parameter $\mathcal{R}_{0}$ for the model. We then determine both the disease-free equilibrium (DFE) and endemic equilibrium (EE) and discuss the stability of the model. We show that both the equilibrium states are locally asymptotically stable. Employing Lyapunov functions theory, global stabilities at both the levels are carried out. We use the Runge–Kutta method of order 4 (RK4) and a non-standard finite difference (NSFD) scheme for the susceptible–exposed–infected–recovered (SEIR) model. In contrast to RK4, which fails for large time step size, it is found that the NSFD scheme preserves the dynamics of the proposed model for any step size used. Numerical results along with the comparison, using different values of step size h, are provided.