On Contribution of Vaccines in the Transmission and Control of COVID-19 in South Africa: from mathematical modeling point of view

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic had profoundly changed the way we lived and perceived our lives. The successful delivery of vaccines together with relentless effort from all stakeholders helped us to ``reclaim our normal way life''. In this article, we propose a mathematical model that incorporates most features of COVID-19 transmission dynamics to investigate the contribution of vaccines to control the pandemic. The basic reproduction number of the model, denoted by $\mathcal{R}_0$ is calculated. During imperfect vaccination and recovery does not lead into permanent immunity, we have shown that the model could exhibit a backward bifurcation when $\mathcal{R}_0<1$. With perfect vaccination and recovery guarantees permanent immunity, the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable for $\mathcal{R}_0<1$ and unstable for $\mathcal{R}_0>1$. Numerical experiments are also conducted to support the theoretical analysis. The model is fitted into a real data from open sources and the sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number with respect to involved parameters is done to identify the most sensitive parameters for control intervention. Finally, we conclude from the numerical experiments that vaccines have significantly improved the recovery rate from COVID-19 infection but do not offer complete protection protection.