Effects of delayed recovery and nonuniform transmission on the spreading of diseases in complex networks

► We present a novel epidemic model which simultaneously considers the delayed recovery and non-uniform transmission effect. ► Mean-field approximation is used to derive the critical threshold of the epidemic model. ► Numerical results well agree with the mean-field result of critical threshold. ► Compared to the standard model, the delayed recovery can largely promote the outbreak of epidemics. ► Compared to the standard model, the non-uniform transmission can inhibit the outbreak of epidemics.