Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention Strategies to Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Preference Ranking Method

Abstract

One of the hot topics of discussion today is coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).  The disease is easily transmitted from one person to another person. However, there are no specific drugs that can alleviate the disease thus non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies is a good option. This paper aims to apply the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) method to outrank the intervention strategies. A case study is presented where five experts were invited to rate ten alternatives and ten criteria using linguistic scales. Spreadsheet software and PROMETHEE-GAIA software were employed to establish outranking results and to provide evidence on the vigorousness of the outranking results. The final outranking indicates that the most and the least preferred intervention strategies are alternative A1 (lockdown/quarantine) and alternative A10 (Practice of hand hygiene) respectively. The outranking results are further analyzed with distribution analysis and weights sensitivity analysis where these analyses provide evidence on the vigorous of the outranking results. It is found that these analyses confirm the position of A1 as the most preferred intervention strategy to curtail the COVID-19 transmissions.  The findings would be beneficial for public health authorities to deal with multiple challenges to curb the spread of COVID-19.