Quarantine Vehicle Scheduling for Transferring High-Risk Individuals in Epidemic Areas

In a large-scale epidemic outbreak, there can be many high-risk individuals to be transferred for medical isolation in epidemic areas. Typically, the individuals are scattered across different locations, and available quarantine vehicles are limited. Therefore, it is challenging to efficiently schedule the vehicles to transfer the individuals to isolated regions to control the spread of the epidemic. In this paper, we formulate such a quarantine vehicle scheduling problem for high-risk individual transfer, which is more difficult than most well-known vehicle routing problems. To efficiently solve this problem, we propose a hybrid algorithm based on the water wave optimization (WWO) metaheuristic and neighborhood search. The metaheuristic uses a small population to rapidly explore the solution space, and the neighborhood search uses a gradual strategy to improve the solution accuracy. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms several existing algorithms and obtains high-quality solutions on real-world problem instances for high-risk individual transfer in Hangzhou, China, during the peak period of the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19).

Treatment Intensification in the ‘High-risk’ Individual

The high-risk individual merits treatment intensification. However, there are concerns with CERT. More supportive care is necessary as toxicity is higher. Treatment related death is a reality. Hence before we set out to prescribe concurrent chemoradiation we would need to stratify them according to the risk factors, their performance status and bear in mind the costs involved in intensive support during treatment. Apart from chemoradiation we need to explore emerging treatment strategies such as fractionated radiation therapy, and targeted therapies such as epidermal growth factor receptor blockade which might offer better if not similar results but with lesser toxicity.