Evaluation of the Treatment Options for COVID-19 Patients Using Generalized Hesitant Fuzzy- Multi Criteria Decision Making Techniques

The breakout of the pandemic COVID-19 has affected numerous countries andterritories worldwide. As COVID-19 specific medicines yet to be invented, at presentthe treatment is case specific, hence identification and evaluation of different prevalenttreatment options based on various criteria and attributes are very important not onlyfrom the point of view of present pandemic but also for futuristic pandemicpreparedness. The present study focusses on identifying, evaluation and ranking oftreatment options using Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). In this regard, theexisting literature, doctors and scientist were interviewed to know the current treatmentoptions in vogue and the scale of their importance with respect to the criteria. Thecriteria taken are side effect, regime cost, treatment duration, plasma stability, plasmaturnover, time of suppression, ease of application, drug-drug interaction, compliance,fever, pneumonia, intensive care, organ failure, macrophage activation syndrome,hemophagocytic syndrome, pregnancy, kidney problem, age. This study extendedHesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) to Generalized Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (GHFS). GeneralizedHesitant Pentagonal Fuzzy Number (GHPFN) is developed. The properties of GHPFNare demonstrated. Two types of GHPFN has been described. The GHPFN (2 nd type)along with MCDM tool Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution(TOPSIS) has been applied to rank the treatment options. The result of the studyranked ‘Hydroxychloroquine’ as the first alternative followed by, ‘Plasma Exchange’,‘Tocilizumab’, ‘Remdesivir’ and ‘Favipravir’. To check the robustness and steadiness ofthe proposed methodology, comparative analysis and sensitivity analysis has beenconducted.