Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2). It was declared on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization as pandemic disease. The disease has neither approved medicine nor vaccine and has made governments and scholars search for drastic measures in combating the pandemic. Regrettably, the spread of the virus and mortality due to COVID-19 has continued to increase daily. Hence, it is imperative to control the spread of the disease particularly using nonpharmacological strategies such as quarantine, isolation, and public health education. This work studied the effect of these different control strategies as time-dependent interventions using mathematical modeling and optimal control approach to ascertain their contributions in the dynamic transmission of COVID-19. The model was proven to have an invariant region and was well-posed. The basic reproduction number and effective reproduction numbers were computed with and without interventions, respectively, and were used to carry out the sensitivity analysis that identified the critical parameters contributing to the spread of COVID-19. The optimal control analysis was carried out using the Pontryagin’s maximum principle to figure out the optimal strategy necessary to curtail the disease. The findings of the optimal control analysis and numerical simulations revealed that time-dependent interventions reduced the number of exposed and infected individuals compared to time-independent interventions. These interventions were time-bound and best implemented within the first 100 days of the outbreak. Again, the combined implementation of only two of these interventions produced a good result in reducing infection in the population. While, the combined implementation of all three interventions performed better, even though zero infection was not achieved in the population. This implied that multiple interventions need to be deployed early in order to reduce the virus to the barest minimum.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a disease caused by Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2). It was declared on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization as pandemic disease. The disease has neither approved medicine nor vaccine and has made government and scholars search for drastic measures in combating the pandemic. Regrettably, the spread of the virus and mortality due to COVID-19 has continued to increase daily. Hence, it is imperative to control the spread of the disease particularly using non-pharmacological strategies such as quarantine, isolation and public health education. This work studied the effect of these different control strategies as time-dependent interventions using mathematical modeling and optimal control approach to ascertain their contributions in the dynamic transmission of COVID-19. The model was proven to have an invariant region and was well-posed. The basic reproduction number was computed with and without interventions and was used to carry out the sensitivity analysis that identified the critical parameters contributing to the spread of COVID-19. The optimal control analysis was carried out using the Pontryagin maximum principle to figure out the optimal strategy necessary to curtail the disease. The findings of the optimal control analysis and numerical simulations revealed that time-dependent interventions reduced the number of exposed and infected individuals compared to time-independent interventions. These interventions were time-bound and best implemented within the first 100 days of the outbreak. Again, the combined implementation of only two of these interventions produced a good result in reducing infection in the population, while the combined implementation of all three interventions performed better, even though zero infection was not achieved in the population. This implied that multiple interventions need to be deployed early in order to the virus to the barest minimum.

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease affecting communities surrounded by water bodies where fishing activities take place or people go to swim, wash and cultivate crops. It poses a great risk to the health and economic life of inhabitants of the area. This study was carried out to evaluate the impact of public health education and snail control measures on the incidence of schistosomiasis. A model was developed with attention given to the snail and human populations that are the hosts of the cercariae and miracidia respectively. The existence and stability of disease-free and endemic equilibrium states were established. The disease-free and endemic equilibrium states were shown to be locally asymptotically stable whenever the basic reproduction number was less than unity. Numerical simulations of the model were carried out to evaluate the impact of interventions (public health education and snail control measures) on schistosomiasis transmission. It was observed that the implementation of low coverage snail control with highly efficacious molluscicide and massive public health education will make the basic reproduction number smaller than unity, which implies the eradication of schistosomiasis in the population.

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