Vaccine Distribution under pandemic: The case of COVID 19 in India

Abstract of the Project

The recent pandemic caused by the outbreak of COVID-19 had an adverse effect on social, economic and education system all over the world. Things are getting worse with the spread of new Covid strains reported in India. Although complete lockdown was effective in India in limiting the spread, but the unknown pharmaceutical approaches to tackle the novel virus has made the task difficult for frontline workers. Moreover, the spread of virus in different geographical locations suffered unexpectedly due to the absence of prior techniques to face SARS-CoV-2. We, in our research, want to work on a generic model for vaccine distribution and a generic prediction tool to forecast infection spread in different locations with the aim of preparing India for a future virus attack of the likes of Covid -19. Acknowledging the motivation, we are working on building a Modified SIR (Susceptible Infected Recovered) model from dynamic transportation data to calculate the risk of spread associated with transport for various locations. This is followed by a simultaneous task of computing comorbidity index analysing the disease data of a specific location. Later, the outputs are merged to solve a facility location problem by generating demand on the basis of comorbidity index and estimated risk of virus attack. We expect to build efficient models to distribute medical essentials by predicting potential pandemic epicenters.