Bifurcations and complex dynamics of an SIR model with the impact of the number of hospital beds (Q2453949)

The authors thoroughly investigate a SIR model of epidemiology with a nonlinear recovery rate that takes into account the influence of public health resources such as the number of available hospital beds. Theoretical results as well as numerical simulations yield a rich and complex behavior of the solutions in the positive octant, when up to 3 parameters (out of 7) are suitably varied. The authors show bifurcations of various codimensions, such as: saddle-node bifurcations of equilibria and of limit cycles, Hopf bifurcations with one and two emerging limit cycles, and Bogdanov-Takens bifurcations of codimensions 2 and 3. For proving the latter result, the three-dimensional problem is reduced to a planar problem by applying center manifold theory. Interesting bifurcation diagrams and phase portraits yield good illustrations of the important results.