Impact of Infective Immigrants on COVID-19 Dynamics

The COVID-19 epidemic is an unprecedented and major social and economic challenge worldwide due to the various restrictions. Inflow of infective immigrants have not been given prominence in several mathematical and epidemiological models. To investigate the impact of imported infection on the number of deaths, cumulative infected and cumulative asymptomatic, we formulate a mathematical model with infective immigrants and considering vaccination. The basic reproduction number of the special case of the model without immigration of infective people is derived. We varied two key factors that affect the transmission of COVID-19, namely the immigration and vaccination rates. In addition, we considered two different SARS-CoV-2 transmissibilities in order to account for new more contagious variants such as Omicron. Numerical simulations using initial conditions approximating the situation in the US when the vaccination program was starting show that increasing the vaccination rate significantly improves the outcomes regarding the number of deaths, cumulative infected and cumulative asymptomatic. Other factors are the natural recovery rates of infected and asymptomatic individuals, the waning rate of the vaccine and the vaccination rate. When the immigration rate is increased significantly, the number of deaths, cumulative infected and cumulative asymptomatic increase. Consequently, accounting for the level of inflow of infective immigrants may help health policy/decision-makers to formulate policies for public health prevention programs, especially with respect to the implementation of the stringent preventive lock down measure.