The Memory Effect on Fractional Calculus: An Application in the Spread of Covid-19

Abstract

Fractional calculus has been widely used in mathematical modeling of evolutionary systems with memory effect on dynamics. The main interest of this work is to attest, through a statistical approach, how the hysteresis phenomenon, which describes a type of memory effect present in biological systems, can be treated by fractional calculus. We also analyse the contribution of the historical values of a function in the evaluation of fractional operators according to their order. In order to illustrate the efficiency of this non-integer order calculus, we consider the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) compartmental model which is widely used in epidemiology. We employ this compartmental model to study the dynamics of the spread of Covid-19 in some countries, one version with memory and one without memory.