Asymptotic Behavior of SIRS Models in State-dependent Random Environments

Abstract

The extinction and persistence of infective individuals are closely related to the random change of the environment. In this paper, via the random/stochastic SIRS models, we analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the impact caused by the random change of the environment. Our contributions consist in (i) giving some sufficient conditions on extinction (persistence) of the infectious individuals even though they are persistent (resp. extinct) in certain fixed environments; (ii) revealing the influence of random switching of incidence functions on extinction for the infectious individuals, which has not been studied before; (iii) establishing a criterion to judge extinction of the infectious individuals for a range of random/stochastic SIRS models with state-dependent switching via a stochastic comparison for functionals of jump processes. Moreover, some examples are set to illustrate the applications of our theory.