Research Article
Z-Control on COVID-19-Exposed Patients in Quarantine
Nita H. Shah , Nisha Sheoran, and Ekta Jayswal
Department of Mathematics, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Correspondence should be addressed to Nita H. Shah; nitahshah@gmail.com
Received 3 April 2020; Accepted 23 May 2020; Published 19 June 2020
Academic Editor: Sining Zheng
Copyright © 2020 Nita H. Shah et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In this paper, a mathematical model for diabetic or hypertensive patients exposed to COVID-19 is formulated along with a set of
first-order nonlinear differential equations. e system is said to exhibit two equilibria, namely, exposure-free and endemic points.
e reproduction number is obtained for each equilibrium point. Local stability conditions are derived for both equilibria, and
global stability is studied for the endemic equilibrium point. is model is investigated along with Z-control in order to eliminate
chaos and oscillation epidemiologically showing the importance of quarantine in the COVID-19 environment.
1. Introduction
COVID-19, an infectious disease with the first case reported
in Wuhan city of China, has spread throughout the world.
On 30 January 2020, the WHO declared its outbreak as
a “public health emergency of international concern.” As on
2 April 2020, 08:02 GMT, it has caused 47,249 deaths
worldwide and a total of 936,237 cases have been confirmed
[1]. COVID-19 spreads through the contact of individuals
with infected persons when they cough or sneeze. It is
a respiratory disease with mild to moderate symptoms like
dry cough, fever, and tiredness, and in more severe cases
difficulty breathing [2]. Also, few individuals showing mild
symptoms of the disease may recover themselves if they
avoid contacting infected cases and maintain good hygiene.
COVID-19 is a major health threat to those with a past
medical history and also to those who are older than 60 years
(elderly population). is was reported by Li et al. [3], who
calculated the median age of 425 patients infected with
COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, as 59 years and almost half of
the patients were 60 years old.
Governments throughout the world are taking several
preventive measures to control the spread of the epidemic.
Preventing the spread is the only way since no vaccine has
been developed till date to fight the virus. Preventive
measures include maintaining at least 1 meter distance from
a person sneezing or coughing, washing hands regularly, and
maintaining social distance.
Various mathematical models have been developed so
far to address various challenges in predicting the spread of
COVID-19 disease. Batista [4] has used the basic SIR-model
to find the actual size of the epidemic. Peng et al. [5] analysed
the scenario of COVID-19 in China by formulating the SEIR
dynamical system and have predicted that the situation will
be under control at the beginning of April.
Sun et al. [6] discussed various aspects of COVID-19
situation in China which helps understand the fatality rate
and transmission rate of COVID-19 and control the epi-
demic spread. In the case of COVID-19 epidemic, exposure
to disease plays a vital role in the spread of the disease.
Rabajante [7] studied various models and concluded that
with the basic reproduction number being 2 and considering
the 14-day infectious period, if an infected person stays for
more than 9 hours with others, he could infect others. If the
exposure time is 18 hours, the model recommends full
protection with more than 70% effectiveness to the attendees
of the social gathering. In order to control the disease, the
importance of travel quarantine or travel restriction, which
delayed the progression of disease, in Wuhan was studied by
Chinazzi et al. [8]. A similar result was also shown by
Kucharski et al. [9]. ey showed that with the air travel
restriction in Wuhan, the daily reproduction number de-
clined from 2.35 to 1.05. ere is also a model evaluated by
Tang et al. [10] and Tang et al. [11] in which they divided the
subpopulation into quarantined and unquarantined classes
to understand the transmission risk of the epidemic.
Hindawi
International Journal of Differential Equations
Volume 2020, Article ID 7876146, 11 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/7876146