| Literature DB >> 33520630 |
Neha Ghorui1, Arijit Ghosh2, Sankar Prasad Mondal3, Mohd Yazid Bajuri4, Ali Ahmadian5, Soheil Salahshour6, Massimiliano Ferrara7.
Abstract
The outburst of the pandemic Coronavirus disease since December 2019, has severely impacted the health and economy worldwide. The epidemic is spreading fast through various means, as the virus is very infectious. Medical science is exploring a vaccine, only symptomatic treatment is possible at the moment. To contain the virus, it is required to categorize the risk factors and rank those in terms of contagion. This study aims to evaluate risk factors involved in the spread of COVID-19 and to rank them. In this work, we applied the methodology namely, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to find out the weights and finally Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (HFS) with Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied to identify the major risk factor. The results showed that "long duration of contact with the infected person" the most significant risk factor, followed by "spread through hospitals and clinic" and "verbal spread". We showed the appliance of the Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools in evaluation of the most significant risk factor. Moreover, we conducted sensitivity analysis.Entities:
Keywords: COVID-19; FAHP; Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (HFS)-TOPSIS; Infectious; Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM)
Year: 2021 PMID: 33520630 PMCID: PMC7833077 DOI: 10.1016/j.rinp.2020.103811
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Results Phys ISSN: 2211-3797 Impact factor: 4.476
Literature review on risk factors for coronavirus disease.
| Authors | Method used | Findings | Risk Factors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mazumdar et al. | GMDH, TOPSIS-1 | 1. Monitor the main alternative for the pandemic. | a. Verbal contamination |
| Zheng et al. | Meta- Analysis | 1. Identified the risk factor for critical, non-critical COVID-19 patients and also analyzed the mortality with Meta-Analysis | a. Smoking patients age over 65 (male) |
| Tian et al. | Uni-variate and Multivariate Logistic Regression | 1. Patients with malignancy are prone to severe illness with COVID-19 than patient without cancer | a. Cancer patients |
| Present article | FAHP, HFS-TOPSIS, | 1. Long duration of contact with the infected person is the significant risk factor | a. Verbal spread |
Fig. 1Flow chart for the proposed study.
Linguistic terms in Triangular Fuzzy Number (TFN) for the assessment of Criteria’s weight.
| Linguistic Term | THFS |
|---|---|
| Highly Important | (4.5,5,5.5) |
| Important | (3.5,4,4.5) |
| Fairly Important | (2.5,3,3.5) |
| Less Important | (1.5,2,2.5) |
| Very Less Important | (0.5,1,1.5) |
Representation of different risk factors.
| Risk Factors Associated with the disease | Brief description |
|---|---|
| Verbal Spread, | Verbal spread is due to the cough, sneezing and viral load of an infected person. |
| Long Duration of contact with the Infected person, | Time factor significantly depends when a normal person is with an infected person. |
| Not maintaining personal hygiene, | Frequently usage of sanitizer, washing hands, changing clothes if a person comes from outside is highly recommended. |
| Not using quality mask, | N-95 and surgical mask are recommended by doctors, as these masks lowers down the risk, whereas it is seen that the normal mask doesn’t prevent the disease and probability is higher if not using quality masks. |
| Not maintaining distance in public transport or public places, | Maintaining Social distance is very important |
| Infection spread through hospitals and clinic, | A person has higher probability of getting infected, if he/she visits hospitals and clinic. |
Fig. 2Hierarchical structure of the study.
Fig. 3Line Chart depicting sensitivity of the ranking based on different methods.
Formation of comparison matrix.
| Comparison Matrix | DM1 | DM2 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | (3.5,4,4.5) | (4.5,5,5.5) | 1 | (0.22,0.25,0.286) | (4.5,5,5.5) | |
| (0.22,0.25,0.286) | 1 | (3.5,4,4.5) | (3.5,4,4.5) | 1 | (4.5,5,5.5) | |
| (0.18,0.2,0.22) | (0.22,0.25,0.286) | 1 | (0.18,0.2,0.22) | (0.18,0.2,0.22) | 1 | |
Representation of criteria’s weight.
| Criteria’s | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Weight | 0.47 | 0.45 | 0.08 |
Construction of hesitant decision matrix.
| Risk Factor’s | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Verbal Spread | (0.5,0.7,0.9) | (0.6,0.7) | (0.8) |
| Long Duration of contact | (0.9) | (0.6,0.7,0.8,0.9) | (0.7,0.8) |
| Not maintaining personal hygiene | (0.4,0.5,0.6) | (0.1,0.3,0.5) | (0.5) |
| Not using quality mask | (0.2,0.3,0.4,0.5) | (0.3) | (0.4,0.5) |
| Not maintaining distance in public transport or public places | (0.6,0.7) | (0.4,0.5,0.6) | (0.3,0.4,0.5,0.6) |
| Infection spread through hospitals and clinic | (0.8,0.9) | (0.6,0.7,0.8) | (0.4,0.5,0.6) |
Relative closeness of the alternatives.
| Risk Factors | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.122 | 0.5225 | 0.811 | |
| 0.0715 | 0.704 | 0.91 | |
| 0.482 | 0.357 | 0.42 | |
| 0.556 | 0.1725 | 0.24 | |
| 0.3255 | 0.3735 | 0.53 | |
| 0.1375 | 0.615 | 0.82 |
Different ranking obtained.
| Risk Factors | FAHP HFS-TOPSIS (M1) | Crisp AHP-TOPSIS (M2) | PIVN AHP-TOPSIS (M3) | FAHP-FTOPSIS (M4) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 | |
| 1 | 5 | 3 | 2 | |
| 5 | 6 | 6 | 6 | |
| 6 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | |
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 |