Global asymptotic stability of a delay differential equation model for SARS-CoV-2 virus infection mediated by ACE2 receptor protein

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a serious threat to human life safety worldwide. SARS-CoV-2 virus mainly binds to the target cell surface receptor ACE2 (Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 ) through the S protein expressed on the surface of the virus, resulting in infection of target cells. During this infection process, the target cell ACE2 receptor plays a very important mediating role. In this paper, a delay differential equation model containing the mediated effect of target cell receptor is established according to the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 virus invasion of target cells, and the global stability of the infection-free equilibrium and the infected equilibrium of the model is obtained by using the basic reproduction number ℛ0 and constructing the appropriate Lyapunov functional. The expression of the basic reproduction number ℛ0 intuitively gives the dependence on the expression ratio of the target cell surface ACE2 receptor, which is helpful for the understanding of the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection.