Abstract
Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, makeshift (MS) hospitals have become an important feature in healthcare systems worldwide. Healthcare personnel (HCP) need to be able to navigate quickly, effectively, and safely to help patients, while still maintaining their own well-being. In this study, a pathfinding algorithm to help HCP navigate through a hospital safely and effectively is developed and verified. Tests are run using a discretized 2D grid as a representation of an MS hospital plan, and total distance traveled and total exposure to disease are measured. The influence of the size of the 2D grid units, the shape of these units, and degrees of freedom in the potential movement of the HCP are investigated. The algorithms developed are designed to be used in MS hospitals where airborne illness is prevalent and could greatly reduce the risk of illness in HCP. In this study, it was found that the quantum-based algorithm would generate paths that accrued 50–66% less total disease quantum than the shortest path algorithm with also about a 33–50% increase in total distance traveled. It was also found that the mixed path algorithm-generated paths accrued 33–50% less quantum, but only increased total distance traveled by 10–20%.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges to healthcare systems worldwide and caused over 4 million deaths, which are rising still [1]
After the outbreak started, not much was known about COVID-19, which resulted in a lack of proper protection for healthcare workers
The effect that the size of the fundamental discretization units had on the total distance traveled by all the agents was measured, and it was found that the smaller the units were, the less total distance the agents needed to travel to finish their paths
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges to healthcare systems worldwide and caused over 4 million deaths, which are rising still [1]. Makeshift (MS) hospitals started popping up wherever they were needed, but they did not have the same ventilation and protection as a normal hospital would These MS hospitals were only regulated to have exhaust air volume of 150 m3 per hour per person, whereas the guideline for infection control by the WHO is 288 m3 per hour per person [2]. During the initial stages of the pandemic, in Wuhan, China, the infection rate among healthcare workers was anywhere from 3.5% to 29% throughout various hospitals [3]. This infection rate is extremely high and eventually would drop as PPE regulations were put into place and healthcare workers were supplied with proper protection and training. The most reported reasons for this were the lack of PPE, followed by work overload and lack of proper hygiene or inadequate usage of PPE
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