SEIRD model in heterogenous populations: The role of commuting and social inequalities in the COVID-19 dynamics

Abstract: In this paper we analyze the effects of commuting and social inequalities for the epidemic development of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). With this aim we consider a SEIRD (susceptible, exposed, infected, recovered and dead by disease) model without vital dynamics in a population divided into patches that have different economic resources and in which the individuals can commute from one patch to another (bilaterally). In the modeling we choose the social and commuting parameters arbitrarily. We calculate the basic reproductive number $R_0$ with the next generation approach and analyze the sensitivity of $R_0$ with respect to the parameters. Furthermore, we run numerical simulations considering a population divided into two patches to bring some conclusions on the number of total infected individuals and cumulative deaths for our model considering heterogeneous populations.