On a reaction–diffusion system modelling infectious diseases without lifetime immunity

In this paper, we study a mathematical model for an infectious disease caused by a virus such as Cholera without lifetime immunity. Due to the different mobility for susceptible, infected human and recovered human hosts, the diffusion coefficients are assumed to be different. The resulting system is governed by a strongly coupled reaction–diffusion system with different diffusion coefficients. Global existence and uniqueness are established under certain assumptions on known data. Moreover, global asymptotic behaviour of the solution is obtained when some parameters satisfy certain conditions. These results extend the existing results in the literature. The main tool used in this paper comes from the delicate theory of elliptic and parabolic equations. Moreover, the energy method and Sobolev embedding are used in deriving a priori estimates. The analysis developed in this paper can be employed to study other epidemic models in biological, ecological and health sciences.

Random walk on ellipsoids method for solving elliptic and parabolic equations

A Random Walk on Ellipsoids (RWE) algorithm is developed for solving a general class of elliptic equations involving second- and zero-order derivatives. Starting with elliptic equations with constant coefficients, we derive an integral equation which relates the solution in the center of an ellipsoid with the integral of the solution over an ellipsoid defined by the structure of the coefficients of the original differential equation. This integral relation is extended to parabolic equations where a first passage time distribution and survival probability are given in explicit forms. We suggest an efficient simulation method which implements the RWE algorithm by introducing a notion of a separation sphere. We prove that the logarithmic behavior of the mean number of steps for the RWS method remains true for the RWE algorithm. Finally we show how the developed RWE algorithm can be applied to solve elliptic and parabolic equations with variable coefficients. A series of supporting computer simulations are given.