Effects of limited medical resource on a Filippov infectious disease model induced by selection pressure

Abstract In reality, the outbreak of emerging infectious diseases including SARS, A/H1N1 and Ebola are accompanied by the common cold and flu. The selective treatment measure for mitigating and controlling the emerging infectious diseases should be implemented due to limited medical resources. However, how to determine the threshold infected cases and when to implement the selective treatment tactics are crucial for disease control. To address this, we derive a non-smooth Filippov system induced by selective treatment measure. The dynamic behaviors of two subsystems have been discussed completely, and the existence conditions for sliding segment, sliding mode dynamics and different types of equilibria such as regular equilibrium, pseudo-equilibrium, boundary equilibrium and tangent point have been provided. Further, numerical sliding bifurcation analyses show that the proposed Filippov system has rich sliding bifurcations. Especially, the most interesting results are those for the fixed parameter set as the bifurcation parameter varies, the sliding bifurcations occur sequentially: crossing → buckling → real/virtual equilibrium → buckling → crossing. The key factors which affect the selective treatment measures and the threshold value of infected cases for emerging infectious disease have been discussed in more detail.