Dynamics of a fractional epidemiological model with disease infection in both the populations

In order to depict a situation of possible spread of infection from prey to predator, a fractional-order model is developed and its dynamics is surveyed in terms of boundedness, uniqueness, and existence of the solutions. We introduce several threshold parameters to analyze various points of equilibrium of the projected model, and in terms of these threshold parameters, we have derived some conditions for the stability of these equilibrium points. Global stability of axial, predator-extinct, and disease-free equilibrium points are investigated. Novelty of this model is that fractional derivative is incorporated in a system where susceptible predators get the infection from preys while predating as well as from infected predators and both infected preys and predators do not reproduce. The occurrences of transcritical bifurcation for the proposed model are investigated. By finding the basic reproduction number, we have investigated whether the disease will become prevalent in the environment. We have shown that the predation of more number of diseased preys allows us to eliminate the disease from the environment, otherwise the disease would have remained endemic within the prey population. We notice that the fractional-order derivative has a balancing impact and it assists in administering the co-existence among susceptible prey, infected prey, susceptible predator, and infected predator populations. Numerical computations are conducted to strengthen the theoretical findings.