Identification of dominant risk factor involved in spread of COVID-19 using hesitant fuzzy MCDM methodology

Neha Ghorui; Arijit Ghosh; Sankar Prasad Mondal; Mohd Yazid Bajuri; Ali Ahmadian; Soheil Salahshour; Massimiliano Ferrara

doi:10.1016/j.rinp.2020.103811

Identification of dominant risk factor involved in spread of COVID-19 using hesitant fuzzy MCDM methodology

Results Phys. 2021 Feb:21:103811. doi: 10.1016/j.rinp.2020.103811. Epub 2021 Jan 7.

Authors

Neha Ghorui¹, Arijit Ghosh², Sankar Prasad Mondal³, Mohd Yazid Bajuri⁴, Ali Ahmadian⁵, Soheil Salahshour⁶, Massimiliano Ferrara⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mathematics, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
² Department of Mathematics, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
³ Department of Applied Science, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal, Haringhata, India.
⁴ Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
⁵ Institute of IR 4.0, The National University of Malaysia, 43600 UKM, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia.
⁶ Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey.
⁷ ICRIOS - The Invernizzi Centre for Research in Innovation, Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Bocconi University - Department of Management and Technology Via Sarfatti, 25 20136 Milano, MI, Italy.

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; FAHP; Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (HFS)-TOPSIS; Infectious; Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM).