How do the contaminated environment influence the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic?

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that first appeared in Wuhan city and then globally. The COVID-19 pandemic exudes public health and socio-economic burden globally. Mathematical modeling plays a significant role to comprehend the transmission dynamics and controlling factors of rapid spread of the disease. Researchers focus on the human-to-human transmission of the virus but the SARS-CoV-2 virus also contaminates the environment. In this study we proposed a nonlinear mathematical model for the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the transmission dynamics of the disease in India. We have also incorporated the environment contamination by the infected individuals as the population density is very high in India. The model is fitted and parameterized using daily new infection data from India. Analytical study of the proposed COVID-19 model, including feasibility of critical points and their stability reveals that the infection-free steady state is stable if the basic reproduction number is less than unity otherwise the system shows significant outbreak. Numerical illustrations demonstrates that if the rate of environment contamination increased then the number of infected persons also increased. But if the environment is disinfected by sanitization then the number of infected persons cannot drastically increase.