Quantifying optimal resource allocation strategies for controlling epidemics.

Abstract

Frequent emergence of communicable diseases is 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 for 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. The optimal allocation strategy for long-term dynamics exhibits non-monotonic behaviour with respect to the effectiveness of interventions, which differs from the more intuitive strategy recommended in the case of outbreaks. Further, our results indicate that the relationship between investment in interventions and the corresponding increase in patient recovery rate or decrease in disease transmission rate plays a decisive role in determining optimal strategies. Intervention programmes with decreasing returns promote the necessity for resource sharing. Our study provides fundamental insights into determining the best response strategy when controlling epidemics in resource-constrained situations.