On quasi-linear reaction diffusion systems arising from compartmental SEIR models

The global existence and boundedness of solutions to quasi-linear reaction-diffusion systems are investigated. The system arises from compartmental models describing the spread of infectious diseases proposed in Viguerie et al. (Appl Math Lett 111:106617, 2021); Viguerie et al. (Comput Mech 66(5):1131-1152, 2020), where the diffusion rate is assumed to depend on the total population, leading to quasilinear diffusion with possible degeneracy. The mathematical analysis of this model has been addressed recently in Auricchio et al. (Math Methods Appl Sci 46:12529-12548, 2023) where it was essentially assumed that all sub-populations diffuse at the same rate, which yields a positive lower bound of the total population, thus removing the degeneracy. In this work, we remove this assumption completely and show the global existence and boundedness of solutions by exploiting a recently developed $$ -energy method. Our approach is applicable to a larger class of systems and is sufficiently robust to allow model variants and different boundary conditions.