In this study, a physical system called the blood ethanol concentration model has been investigated in its fractional (non-integer) order version. The three most commonly used fractional operators with singular (Caputo) and non-singular (Atangana-Baleanu fractional derivative in the Caputo sense—ABC and the Caputo-Fabrizio—CF) kernels have been used to fractionalize the model, whereas during the process of fractionalization, the dimensional consistency for each of the equations in the model has been maintained. The Laplace transform technique is used to determine the exact solution of the model in all three cases, whereas its parameters are fitted through the least-squares error minimization technique. It is shown that the fractional versions of the model based upon the Caputo and ABC operators estimate the real data comparatively better than the original integer order model, whereas the CF yields the results equivalent to the results obtained from the integer-order model. The computation of the sum of squared residuals is carried out to show the performance of the models along with some graphical illustrations.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) is a novel virus that emerged in China in late 2019 and caused a pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The epidemic has largely been controlled in China since March 2020, but continues to inflict severe public health and socioeconomic burden in other parts of the world. One of the major reasons for China’s success for the fight against the epidemic is the effectiveness of its health care system and enlightenment (awareness) programs which play a vital role in the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nigeria is currently witnessing a rapid increase of the epidemic likely due to its unsatisfactory health care system and inadequate awareness programs. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in Nigeria. Our model incorporates awareness programs and different hospitalization strategies for mild and severe cases, to assess the effect of public awareness on the dynamics of COVID-19 infection. We fit the model to the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Nigeria from 29 March to 12 June 2020. We find that the epidemic could increase if awareness programs are not properly adopted. We presumed that the effect of awareness programs could be estimated. Further, our results suggest that the awareness programs and timely hospitalization of active cases are essential tools for effective control and mitigation of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria and beyond. Finally, we perform sensitive analysis to point out the key parameters that should be considered to effectively control the epidemic.