Identification and prioritization of strategies to tackle COVID-19 outbreak: A group-BWM based MCDM approach

The world is reeling in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic with fear of rising toll due to the deadly virus. Decision making during a pandemic outbreak has numerous challenges. Covid19 has become a challenging problem for organizations, countries and the world at large. It is even more complicated when governments and medical care communities are changing their priorities based on the growing challenges and level of effectiveness of measures taken in other countries. In this study, a potential application of a well-known MCDM method called the Group Best-Worst Method is presented to overcome such challenges and draw the strategies to handle COVID19 outbreak. The methodology is applied to rank the 10 identified strategies based on their relative importance provided by multiple groups of stakeholder. These strategies focus on social distancing, medical care, essential commodities, financial support to poor people, public awareness, overall impact of COVID19, digital surveillance of infected or doubtful people, maintaining the economy of the country, and an effect on industries. Furthermore, the local and global weights along with ranking order of strategies are obtained. A sensitivity analysis has also been done to show the change in global weights and ranking order of strategies.