Design of control strategies to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 pandemic

Location planning, resource reallocation and patient assignment during a pandemic considering the needs of ordinary patients

During the initial phase of a pandemic outbreak, the rapid increase in the number of infected patients leads to shortages of medical resources for both pandemic-related and non-pandemic (ordinary) patients. It is crucial to efficiently utilize limited existing resources and strike a balance between controlling the pandemic and sustaining regular healthcare system operations. To tackle this challenge, we introduce and investigate the problem of optimizing the location of designated hospitals, reallocating beds within these hospitals, and assigning different types of patients to these hospitals. Designated hospitals isolate pandemic-related patients from ordinary patients to prevent cross-infection. Moreover, isolation beds can be converted into ordinary beds and vice versa. Considering the stochasticity and evolving nature of the pandemic, we formulate this problem as a multi-stage stochastic programming model, integrating a compartmental model with time-varying random parameters to enable dynamic resource allocation as the pandemic progresses. The model is then solved by a data-driven rolling horizon solution approach. We illustrate the effectiveness of our model using real data from the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared with two other approaches, our model demonstrates superior performance in controlling the spread of the pandemic while addressing the needs of both pandemic-related and ordinary patients. We also conduct a series of experiments to uncover managerial insights for policymakers to better utilize existing resources in response to pandemic outbreaks. Results indicate that admitting as many pandemic-related patients as possible during the initial phases of the outbreak can effectively flatten the pandemic peaks and alleviate strain on the healthcare system.

An analytical approach to evaluate the impact of age demographics in a pandemic

The time required to identify and confirm risk factors for new diseases and to design an appropriate treatment strategy is one of the most significant obstacles medical professionals face. Traditionally, this approach entails several clinical studies that may last several years, during which time strict preventative measures must be in place to contain the epidemic and limit the number of fatalities. Analytical tools may be used to direct and accelerate this process. This study introduces a six-state compartmental model to explain and assess the impact of age demographics by designing a dynamic, explainable analytics model of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. An age-stratified mathematical model taking the form of a deterministic system of ordinary differential equations divides the population into different age groups to better understand and assess the impact of age on mortality. It also provides a more accurate and effective interpretation of the disease evolution, specifically in terms of the cumulative numbers of infected cases and deaths. The proposed Kermack-Mckendrick model is incorporated into a non-linear least-squares optimization curve-fitting problem whose optimized parameters are numerically obtained using the Levenberg-Marquard algorithm. The curve-fitting model's efficiency is proved by testing the age-stratified model's performance on three U.S. states: Connecticut, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Our results confirm that splitting the population into different age groups leads to better fitting and forecasting results overall as compared to those achieved by the traditional method, i.e., without age groups. By using comprehensive models that account for age, gender, and ethnicity, regional public health authorities may be able to avoid future epidemics from inflicting more fatalities and establish a public health policy that reduces the burden on the elderly population.

Multi-weight susceptible-infected model for predicting COVID-19 in China

The mutant strains of COVID-19 caused a global explosion of infections, including many cities of China. In 2020, a hybrid AI model was proposed by Zheng et al., which accurately predicted the epidemic in Wuhan. As the main part of the hybrid AI model, ISI method makes two important assumptions to avoid over-fitting. However, the assumptions cannot be effectively applied to new mutant strains. In this paper, a more general method, named the multi-weight susceptible-infected model (MSI) is proposed to predict COVID-19 in Chinese Mainland. First, a Gaussian pre-processing method is proposed to solve the problem of data fluctuation based on the quantity consistency of cumulative infection number and the trend consistency of daily infection number. Then, we improve the model from two aspects: changing the grouped multi-parameter strategy to the multi-weight strategy, and removing the restriction of weight distribution of viral infectivity. Experiments on the outbreaks in many places in China from the end of 2021 to May 2022 show that, in China, an individual infected by Delta or Omicron strains of SARS-CoV-2 can infect others within 3-4 days after he/she got infected. Especially, the proposed method effectively predicts the trend of the epidemics in Xi'an, Tianjin, Henan, and Shanghai from December 2021 to May 2022.

Computer-aided methods for combating Covid-19 in prevention, detection, and service provision approaches

The infectious disease Covid-19 has been causing severe social, economic, and human suffering across the globe since 2019. The countries have utilized different strategies in the last few years to combat Covid-19 based on their capabilities, technological infrastructure, and investments. A massive epidemic like this cannot be controlled without an intelligent and automatic health care system. The first reaction to the disease outbreak was lockdown, and researchers focused more on developing methods to diagnose the disease and recognize its behavior. However, as the new lifestyle becomes more normalized, research has shifted to utilizing computer-aided methods to monitor, track, detect, and treat individuals and provide services to citizens. Thus, the Internet of things, based on fog-cloud computing, using artificial intelligence approaches such as machine learning, and deep learning are practical concepts. This article aims to survey computer-based approaches to combat Covid-19 based on prevention, detection, and service provision. Technically and statistically, this article analyzes current methods, categorizes them, presents a technical taxonomy, and explores future and open issues.

An interpretable system for predicting the impact of COVID-19 government interventions on stock market sectors

Evaluating and understanding the financial impacts of COVID-19 has emerged as an urgent research agenda. Nevertheless, the impacts of government interventions on stock markets remain poorly understood. This study explores, for the first time, the impact of COVID-19 related government intervention policies on different stock market sectors using explainable machine learning-based prediction models. The empirical findings suggest that the LightGBM model provides excellent prediction accuracy while preserving computationally efficient and easy explainability of the model. We also find that COVID-19 government interventions are better predictors of stock market volatility than stock market returns. We further show that the observed effects of government intervention on the volatility and returns of ten stock market sectors are heterogeneous and asymmetrical. Our findings have important implications for policymakers and investors in terms of promoting balance and sustaining prosperity across industry sectors through government interventions.

Dynamic planning of a two-dose vaccination campaign with uncertain supplies

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led public health authorities to face the unprecedented challenge of planning a global vaccination campaign, which for most protocols entails the administration of two doses, separated by a bounded but flexible time interval. The partial immunity already offered by the first dose and the high levels of uncertainty in the vaccine supplies have been characteristic of most of the vaccination campaigns implemented worldwide and made the planning of such interventions extremely complex. Motivated by this compelling challenge, we propose a stochastic optimization framework for optimally scheduling a two-dose vaccination campaign in the presence of uncertain supplies, taking into account constraints on the interval between the two doses and on the capacity of the healthcare system. The proposed framework seeks to maximize the vaccination coverage, considering the different levels of immunization obtained with partial (one dose only) and complete vaccination (two doses). We cast the optimization problem as a convex second-order cone program, which can be efficiently solved through numerical techniques. We demonstrate the potential of our framework on a case study calibrated on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Italy. The proposed method shows good performance when unrolled in a sliding-horizon fashion, thereby offering a powerful tool to help public health authorities calibrate the vaccination campaign, pursuing a trade-off between efficacy and the risk associated with shortages in supply.

Introduction to the special issue on the role of operational research in future epidemics/ pandemics

In this special issue, 23 research papers are published focusing on COVID-19 and operational research solution techniques. First, we detail the process from advertising the call for papers to the point where the best papers are accepted. Then, we provide a summary of each paper focusing on applications, solution techniques and insights for practitioners and policy makers. To provide a holistic view for readers, we have clustered the papers into different groups: transmission, propagation and forecasting, non-pharmaceutical intervention, healthcare network configuration, healthcare resource allocation, hospital operations, vaccine and testing kits, and production and manufacturing. Then, we introduce other possible subjects that can be considered for future research.

Long-term spatial and population-structured planning of non-pharmaceutical interventions to epidemic outbreaks

In this paper, we consider the problem of planning non-pharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of infectious diseases. We propose a new model derived from classical compartmental models; however, we model spatial and population-structure heterogeneity of population mixing. The resulting model is a large-scale non-linear and non-convex optimisation problem. In order to solve it, we apply a special variant of covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. We show that results obtained for three different objectives are better than natural heuristics and, moreover, that the introduction of an individual's mobility to the model is significant for the quality of the decisions. We apply our approach to a six-compartmental model with detailed Poland and COVID-19 disease data. The obtained results are non-trivialand sometimes unexpected; therefore, we believe that our model could be applied to support policy-makers in fighting diseases at the long-term decision-making level.