Epidemic Risk Assessment by a Novel Communication Station Based Method

IEEE Trans Netw Sci Eng. 2021 Feb 11;9(1):332-344. doi: 10.1109/TNSE.2021.3058762. eCollection 2022 Jan.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious consequences in the last few months and trying to control it has been the most important objective. With effective prevention and control methods, the epidemic has been gradually under control in some countries and it is essential to ensure safe work resumption in the future. Although some approaches are proposed to measure people's healthy conditions, such as filling health information forms or evaluating people's travel records, they cannot provide a fine-grained assessment of the epidemic risk. In this paper, we propose a novel epidemic risk assessment method based on the granular data collected by the communication stations. We first compute the epidemic risk of these stations in different intervals by combining the number of infected persons and the way they pass through the station. Then, we calculate the personnel risk in different intervals according to the station trajectory of the queried person. This method could assess people's epidemic risk accurately and efficiently. We also conduct extensive simulations and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: COVID-19; communication station risk; epidemic risk assessment; personnel risk.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U1636215, Grant 61902082, the National Key Research and Development Program of China 2018YFB1004003, the Guangdong Key Research and Development Program of China 2019B010136003, and in part by the Guangdong Province Universities and Colleges Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme (2019).