Optimal Control Strategy to Combat the Spread of Covid-19 in Absence of Effective Vaccine

ABSTRACT

Many regions of the world are now facing the second wave of boomed cases of COVID-19. This time, the second wave of this highly infectious disease (COVID-19) is becoming more devastating. To control the existing situation, more mass testing, and tracing of COVID-19 positive individuals are required. Furthermore, practicing to wear a face mask and maintenance of physical distancing are strongly recommended for everyone. Taking all these into consideration, an optimal control problem has been reformulated in terms of nonlinear ordinary differential equations in this paper. The aim of this study is to explore the control strategy of coronavirus-2 disease (COVID-19) and thus, minimize the number of symptomatic, asymptomatic and infected individuals as well as cost of the controls measures. The optimal control model has been analyzed analytically with the help of the necessary conditions of very well-known Pontryagin's maximum principle. Numerical simulations of the optimal control problem are also performed to illustrate the results.