An integrated hybrid MCDM approach to evaluate countries’ COVID-19 risks

Abstract

To enable planning and early reaction efforts, it is important to identify the nations most at risk from COVID-19's health and humanitarian effects, which could exceed present national response capabilities. INFORM COVID-19 Risk Index developed by European Commission is one of the initiatives to meet the aforementioned need. However, the Index has 40 conflicting and comprehensive indicators (e.g., health system capacity, hygiene, vulnerability) and different countries that lead to a need for multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches. This paper offers an integrated MCDM approach with two phases to re-assess the countries' COVID-19 risks based on INFORM COVID-19 Risk Index. In the first phase, the 40 indicators are prioritized using the Entropy-based multi-choice best-worst method (MC-BWM) to provide multiple viewpoints for the preferences values. In the second phase, 29 countries from different geographical regions are ranked using the COPRAS (Complex Proportional Assessment) method. Applying these three methods together on the COVID-19 risk assessment of countries is the most significant novelty for the relevant literature. The proposed approach has undergone a thorough comparative evaluation with the released INFORM COVID-19 Risk Index, and recommendations are provided based on different scenario analyses.