Spreading dynamics of a diffusive epidemic model with free boundaries and two delays

Abstract A delayed reaction-diffusion system with free boundaries is investigated in this paper to understand how the bacteria spread spatially to larger area from the initial infected habitat. Under the assumptions that the nonlinearities are of monostable type and the initial values satisfy some compatible condition, we show that the free boundary problem is well-posed and discuss the long-time behaviour of solution (including spreading and vanishing) in terms of the spatial-temporal risk index. Furthermore, to determine the spreading speed of free boundaries when spreading occurs, we first study the distribution of roots of a transcendental equation containing a polynomial of degree four and then establish the existence and uniqueness of monotone solution to a delay-induced nonlocal semi-wave problem by employing the approximation method, lower-upper solutions technique and Schauder fixed point theorem. It is shown that time delays slow down the spreading of bacteria.