Stability of a general delay‐distributed virus dynamics model with multi‐staged infected progression and immune response

In this paper, we formulate a ( n + 3)‐dimensional nonlinear virus dynamics model that considers n ‐stages of the infected cells and n + 1 distributed time delays. The model incorporates humoral immune response and general nonlinear forms for the incidence rate of infection, the generation and removal rates of the cells and viruses. Under a set of conditions on the general functions, the basic infection reproduction number and the humoral immune response activation number are derived. Utilizing Lyapunov functionals and LaSalle's invariance principle, the global asymptotic stability of all steady states of the model are proven. Numerical simulations are carried out to confirm the theoretical results.