This paper formulates a latent HIV infection model with saturated immunity, two general infection rates (virus-to-cell and cell-to-cell transmission), and three time delays (infected cell activation delay, virus production delay, and immune response delay). The dynamical behaviors and equilibria stability of the model are theoretically analyzed. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov functions, sufficient conditions for the global asymptotic stability of the infection-free, immune-free, and coexistence equilibria are derived. All theoretical results are validated using numerical simulations. The simulation results reveal the difficulty of suppressing HIV infection for cases with a sufficiently large basic reproduction number. For patients with a high basic reproduction number, a single therapeutic strategy that only enhances the reversion rate of latently infected cells may not be effective.
Ji et al. (Tue,) studied this question.