PLoS ONE (Jan 2023)

Assessing the medical resources in COVID-19 based on evolutionary game.

  • Keyu Guo,
  • Yikang Lu,
  • Yini Geng,
  • Jun Lu,
  • Lei Shi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280067
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 1
p. e0280067

Abstract

Read online

COVID-19 has brought a great challenge to the medical system. A key scientific question is how to make a balance between home quarantine and staying in the hospital. To this end, we propose a game-based susceptible-exposed-asymptomatic -symptomatic- hospitalized-recovery-dead model to reveal such a situation. In this new framework, time-varying cure rate and mortality are employed and a parameter m is introduced to regulate the probability that individuals are willing to go to the hospital. Through extensive simulations, we find that (1) for low transmission rates (β 0.2), large values of m lead to breakdown of the healthcare system, which will further increase the cumulative number of confirmed cases and death cases. Finally, we conduct the empirical analysis using the data from Japan and other typical countries to illustrate the proposed model and to test how our model explains reality.