Quantifying optimal resource allocation strategies for controlling epidemics

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how to optimally allocate limited resources between reducing disease transmission and improving healthcare infrastructure to control epidemics, considering long-term and outbreak scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative framework for optimal resource allocation between two key epidemic interventions, highlighting the impact of intervention effectiveness and diminishing returns.

Findings

Allocating resources to both interventions is often optimal.

Optimal resource allocation exhibits non-monotonic behavior with intervention effectiveness.

Resource sharing is necessary when interventions have decreasing returns.

Abstract

Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development towards disease eradication and optimal management of the social and economic burden has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. In this context, we quantify the optimal fraction of resources that can be allocated to two major intervention measures, namely reduction of disease transmission and improvement of healthcare infrastructure. Our results demonstrate that the effectiveness of each of the interventions has a significant impact on the optimal resource allocation in both long-term disease dynamics and outbreak scenarios. Often allocating resources to both strategies is optimal. For long-term dynamics, a non-monotonic behavior of optimal resource allocation with intervention effectiveness is observed which is different from the more intuitive strategy recommended in case of outbreaks. Further, our result indicates that the relationship between investment into interventions and the corresponding outcomes has a decisive role in determining optimal strategies. Intervention programs with decreasing returns promote the necessity for resource sharing. Our study provides a fundamental insight into determining the best response strategy in case of controlling epidemics under resource-constrained situations.