Traveling waves for a spatial SIRI epidemic model (Q2279394)

This paper studies the existence of travelling waves connecting the disease-free equilibrium and the endemic equilibrium of a spatial \(SIRI\) (susceptible-infective-recovered-infective) model which describes the propagation of diseases with latent infection and relapse such as herpes. The model features a nonlinear force of infection with saturation, a constant birth rate and linear removal, recovery and relapse terms. The authors show that if \(\mathcal{R}_0>1\), where \(\mathcal{R}_0\) is the basic reproduction number of the model, then there is a critical wave speed \(c^*>0\) such that for every \(c>c^*\) the system has a positive travelling wave with speed \(c\) connecting the disease-free equilibrium and the endemic equilibrium, while there is no such solution provided that \(c\in (0,c^*)\). The approach is based on the construction uf upper-lower solutions coupled with the use of Schauder fixed point theorem and of appropriate Lyapunov functionals of Volterra type (for the existence part) and on quantitative estimations of the two-sided Laplace transform (for the nonexistence part). The existence of travelling waves (which are relevant to describe how fast can a disease invade susceptible regions) is also illustrated by means of numerical simulations.