Integrated planning for public health emergencies: A modified model for controlling H1N1 pandemic

Abstract

Infectious disease outbreaks have occurred many times in the past decades and are more likely to occur in the future. Recently, Büyüktahtakin et al. (2018) proposed a new epidemics-logistics model to control the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Considering that different diseases have dissimilar diffusion dynamics and can cause different public health emergencies, we modify the proposed model by changing capacity constraint, and then apply it to control the 2009 H1N1 outbreak in China. We formulate the problem to be a mixed-integer non-linear programming model (MINLP) and simultaneously determine when to open the new isolated wards and when to close the unused isolated wards. The test results reveal that our model could provide effective suggestions for controlling the H1N1 outbreak, including the appropriate capacity setting and the minimum budget required with different intervention start times.

Keywords:

• Epidemic outbreak
• resource allocation
• mixed-integer non-linear programming
• public health emergencies
• optimisation

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments that help improve the quality of the paper. The authors also thank Jiuh-Biing Sheu at National Taiwan University and Esra Büyüktahtakın at New Jersey Institute of Technology, who gave valuable comments during the revising of our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71771120]; National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 16ZDA054]; MOE (Ministry of Education) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 17YJA630058]; and Six Major Talents Peak Project of Jiangsu Province [grant number XYDXXJS-CXTD-005].