Dynamical analysis of SEIS model with nonlinear innate immunity and saturated treatment

In this paper, we develop an SEIS model with Holling type II function representing the innate immunity as well as the saturated treatment. We obtain the existence and stability criteria for the equilibrium points. We observe that when the reproduction number is less than unity, the disease-free equilibrium always exists and is locally asymptotically stable. The multiple endemic equilibrium points can exist independent of the basic reproduction number, and the system may experience bistability. We find that the system can encounter backward or forward bifurcation at $$ , where the contact rate $$ is the bifurcation parameter. Therefore, the disease-free equilibrium may not be globally stable. We deduce the criteria for the presence of Hopf bifurcation where the parameter $$ acts as the bifurcation parameter and the system is a neutrally stable center. We also observe with the aid of a numerical example that a slight perturbation disrupts the neutral stability and the trajectories become either converging or diverging from the equilibrium point. Numerical simulation is performed with the help of MATLAB to justify the findings. We study the effect of nonlinearity of immunity function and the treatment rate on the dynamics of the disease spread. We find that when both are linear, the reproduction number is the same, but the system has a unique endemic equilibrium point that exists for reproduction number greater than unity. We find that there is neither backward bifurcation nor Hopf bifurcation. We also observe that the saturation in treatment enlarges the domain of backward bifurcation making disease eradication an extremely difficult task. The endemic equilibria in the case of saturated treatment may exist far more to the left of the bifurcation parameter $$ . Hence, the nonlinearity of immunity function and treatment function affects the dynamics of an SEIS model highly; therefore, one must be precautious to choose an appropriate function for both while modeling.