Impact of Media-Induced Fear on the Control of COVID-19 Outbreak: A Mathematical Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the world in threat for a long time. It was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and has been declared a pandemic by the WHO. This disease is mainly caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). So far, no vaccine or medicine has been developed for the proper treatment of this disease, so people are afraid of getting infected. The pandemic has placed many nations at the door of socioeconomic emergencies. Therefore, it is very important to predict the development trend of this epidemic, and we know mathematical modelling is a basic tool to research the dynamic behaviour of disease and predict the spreading trend of the disease. In this study, we have formulated a mathematical model for the COVID-19 outbreak by introducing a quarantine class with media-induced fear in the disease transmission rate to analyze the dynamic behaviour of this epidemic. We have calculated the basic reproduction number R 0 , and we observed that when R 0 < 1, disease-free equilibrium is globally stable whereas if R 0 > 1, then the system is permanent and there exists a unique endemic equilibrium point. Global stability of the endemic equilibrium point is developed by using Li and Muldowney’s high-dimensional Bendixson criterion. Finally, some numerical simulations are performed using MATLAB to verify our analytical results.