Аңдатпа
It has been more than two years since the world faced a global pandemic of COVID-19, which affected the global economy negatively and took many human lives. This paper considers the extended susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model and finds out whether it is effective for the government of Kazakhstan to conduct massive free PCR testing of the exposed population. To this end, we constructed a new mathematical model and the government cost function that incorporates the hospital cost for the COVID-19 treatment and the cost of PCR testing. To address the above-mentioned objectives, we constructed nonlinear differential equations for our epidemic model and numerically solved them. Furthermore, the government's cost was modeled as a function that depends on the rate of PCR tests. The findings of the numerical analysis show that the government's cost is minimized if the exposed individuals were tested for the disease as often as possible. Moreover, testing both susceptible and exposed individuals is not beneficial in terms of the economic cost.