On quasi-linear reaction diffusion systems arising from compartmental SEIR models

Abstract: The global existence and boundedness of solutions to quasi-linear reaction-diffusion systems are investigated. The system arises from compartmental models describing the spread of infectious diseases proposed in [Viguerie et al, Appl. Math. Lett. (2021); Viguerie et al, Comput. Mech. (2020)], where the diffusion rate is assumed to depend on the total population, leading to quasilinear diffusion with possible degeneracy. The mathematical analysis of this model has been addressed recently in [Auricchio et al, Math. Method Appl. Sci. (2023] where it was essentially assumed that all sub-populations diffuse at the same rate, which yields a positive lower bound of the total population, thus removing the degeneracy. In this work, we remove this assumption completely and show the global existence and boundedness of solutions by exploiting a recently developed $L^p$-energy method. Our approach is applicable to a larger class of systems and is sufficiently robust to allow model variants and different boundary conditions.