Methodology of emergency medical logistics for multiple epidemic areas in public health emergency.

Chunxia Hou,Huiyuan Jiang,Yong Wang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0253978

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) has brought great disasters to humanity, and its influence continues to intensify. In response to the public health emergencies, prompt relief supplies are key to reduce the damage. This paper presents a method of emergency medical logistics to quick response to emergency epidemics. The methodology includes two recursive mechanisms: (1) the time-varying forecasting of medical relief demand according to a modified susceptible-exposed-infected- Asymptomatic- recovered (SEIAR) epidemic diffusion model, (2) the relief supplies distribution based on a multi-objective dynamic stochastic programming model. Specially, the distribution model addresses a hypothetical network of emergency medical logistics with considering emergency medical reserve centers (EMRCs), epidemic areas and e-commerce warehousing centers as the rescue points. Numerical studies are conducted. The results show that with the cooperation of different epidemic areas and e-commerce warehousing centers, the total cost is 6% lower than without considering cooperation of different epidemic areas, and 9.7% lower than without considering cooperation of e-commerce warehousing centers. Particularly, the total cost is 20% lower than without considering any cooperation. This study demonstrates the importance of cooperation in epidemic prevention, and provides the government with a new idea of emergency relief supplies dispatching, that the rescue efficiency can be improved by mutual rescue between epidemic areas in public health emergency.

Highlights

Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) has been an immense challenge for humanity
The hypothetical emergency medical logistics network considered in this study is depicted in Fig 1, which is a specific two-layer supply chain, involving two primary chain members: (1) rescue points, including the national emergency medical reserve centers (EMRCs), epidemic areas which do not need to be rescued, and e-commerce warehousing centers. (2) demand points, the epidemic areas which need to be rescued
This paper presents a method for emergency medical logistics to quick response to emergency epidemics

Summary

Introduction

Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) has been an immense challenge for humanity. WHO has made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic, while the pandemic will eventually recede, but there can be no going back to business as usual [1, 2]. As well as COVID-19, public health emergencies always result in health threats, economic losses, psychological suffering and so no [3]. In response to public health emergencies, prompt relief supplies are key to reduce the loss of life and other influence. The COVID-19 outbreak originated in Wuhan city of Hubei Province, China, in December 2019. In order to prevent the spread of the epidemic, the government locked down the Wuhan city on January 23, 2020. Hubei Province has 17 cities, of which Wuhan is the capital. Almost 70% of the migrants living in Wuhan come from other cities of Hubei province. Given the epidemic-related information and the basic state of the logistics network, the proposed methodology is used to forecast the spread trend of the COVID-19 and to make medical logistics decisions for Hubei province.

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion