Multi-objective Risk-based Resource Allocation for Urban Pandemic Preparedness: The COVID-19 Case in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

ABSTRACTDetermining how best to allocate resources to be used during a pandemic is a strategic decision that directly affects the success of pandemic response operations. However, government agencies have finite resources, so they can’t monitor everything all of the time: they have to decide how best to allocate their scarce resources (i.e., budget for antivirals and preventive vaccinations, Intensive Care Unit (ICU), ventilators, non-intensive Care Unit (non-ICU), doctors) across a broad range of risk exposures (i.e., geographic spread, routes of transmission, overall poverty, medical preconditions). This paper establishes a comprehensive risk-based emergency management framework that could be used by decision-makers to determine how best to manage medical resources, as well as suggest patient allocation among hospitals and alternative healthcare facilities. A set of risk indexes are proposed by modeling the randomness and uncertainty of allocating resources in a pandemic. The city understudy is modeled as a Euclidean complex network, where depending on the neighborhood influence of allocating a resource in a demand point (i.e., informing citizens, limit social contact, allocate a new hospital) different network configurations are proposed. Finally, a multi-objective risk-based resource allocation (MoRRA) framework is proposed to optimize the allocation of resources in pandemics. The applicability of the framework is shown by the identification of high-risk areas where to prioritize the resource allocation during the current COVID-19 pandemic in Bogotá, Colombia.