Research On The Allocation Of Emergency Resources In The Initial Stage Of Sudden And Unconventional Epidemics

In recent years,the frequent occurrence of sudden and unconventional public health events such as the COVID-19 and the SARS has had an extremely profound impact on the safety of the population and the economic development of society.Looking back at the initial prevention and control of this COVID-19,due to the sudden outbreak of the epidemic,the emergency resources stockpiled by the cities in Hubei Province could hardly meet the prevention and control needs of the entire core area of the epidemic.The unconventional characteristics of the new virus,such as its ease of transmission and long incubation period,made the early stages of the anti-epidemic even more difficult.In view of the serious challenges faced in the early stages of an epidemic outbreak,the question of how to make rational and efficient use of the limited emergency resources in core epidemic areas before the external relief resources reach the epidemic areas,and to make full use of their epidemiological value to reduce the impact of the epidemic on the population,has become a key issue to be addressed in current research.In existing studies that consider the distribution of emergency resources in a sudden epidemic environment,most scholars base the dispatch of emergency resources on a central reserve of resources.However,it often takes a long time to collect emergency resources from outside and then transport them to the affected areas.During this time,when infected areas only focus on their own epidemic prevention work,the epidemic in the serious areas will deteriorate rapidly in the absence of resources and spread to other adjacent epidemic areas,and the whole epidemic prevention work in the core areas of epidemic is at risk of getting out of control.Furthermore,given that the governments of each region are directly responsible for the prevention and control of epidemics in their own region,their targeted response efforts will have a direct impact on the evolution of infectious diseases within the region.Based on this,this paper examines the issue of self-rescue and mutual recue in epidemic areas in the context of the prevention of epidemics in the core areas at the beginning of an infectious disease outbreak,i.e.,areas where the epidemic is less serious should consider whether to rescue areas where the epidemic is severe before outside relief supplies arrive.To address the characteristics of the problem considered,this paper first constructs a quantitative framework of government epidemic response behaviors around the changes in government epidemic response behaviors at the beginning of a sudden epidemic in a realistic scenario.At the same time,the government epidemics-response behaviors framework was added to the traditional SVEIR model and construct the epidemics-response model.Secondly,unlike most of the existing studies,which are based on the idea of “demand forecasting first,then resources deployment”,which is not the way of the concept to distribute the resources considered in this paper.This paper takes into account the coupling between government response behaviors,the dynamic evolution of infectious diseases and the distribution of emergency resources from the perspective of overall system optimization,and an innovative epidemics-response-logistics emergency management framework model that integrates government response behaviors,outbreak dynamics and resources distribution in the early stages of an infectious disease has constructed.Again,the constructed model has considered the realistic requirements of the governments of the core epidemic areas themselves,i.e.,minimize the number of infections in the entire core epidemic area while respect for the needs of epidemic prevention in each epidemic area,that is constrain the mutual aid behaviors of each infected area with the statement that “the post-rescue situation cannot be worse than if the epidemic that under the self-rescue scene”.Finally,this paper designs an HGA algorithm containing an iterative local search algorithm and a genetic algorithm for model solving,and demonstrates the effectiveness of the HGA algorithm solution by means of stochastic arithmetic examples.The case study of the Hubei outbreak shows that mutual rescue in infected areas can effectively reduce the initial impact of infectious diseases.At the same time,analysis based on relevant parameters showed that Government outbreak response behaviors significantly influenced the effectiveness of prevention and control in the early stages of the outbreak.This study can provide a reserve of theories,models and methods for similar large-scale public health disasters that may occur in the future,enhance the emergency logistics guarantee capability for large-scale public health emergencies in China,and significantly reduce the losses and impacts caused by large-scale public health emergencies.At the same time,the research in this paper can positively respond to the relevant policy documents issued by the state in the field of emergency logistics in recent years,thus helping to accelerate the construction of the emergency protection system for major public health emergencies in China.