2020/02/26 by Mi Jin Lee, Lee, Mi Jin, Kanghun Kim +5
Business, Management and Accounting · Health Professions · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Facility Location and Emergency Management #Healthcare Operations and Scheduling Optimization #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.11324
openalex publication_date 2020/02/26 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The spatial distributions of diverse facilities are often understood in terms\nof the optimization of the commute distance or the economic profit.\nIncorporating more general objective functions into such optimization framework\nmay be useful, helping the policy decisions to meet various social and economic\ndemands. As an example, we consider how hospitals should be distributed to\nminimize the total fatalities of tuberculosis (TB). The empirical data of Korea\nshows that the fatality rate of TB in a district decreases with the areal\ndensity of hospitals, implying their correlation and the possibility of\nreducing the nationwide fatalities by adjusting the hospital distribution\nacross districts. Approximating the fatality rate by the probability of a\npatient not to visit a hospital in her/his residential district for the\nduration period of TB and evaluating the latter probability in the random-walk\nframework, we obtain the fatality rate as an exponential function of the\nhospital density with a characteristic constant related to each district's\neffective lattice constant estimable empirically. This leads us to the optimal\nhospital distribution which finds the hospital density in a district to be a\nlogarithmic function of the rescaled patient density. The total fatalities is\nreduced by 13 % with this optimum. The current hospital density deviates from\nthe optimized one in different manners from district to district, which is\nanalyzed in the proposed model framework. The assumptions and limitations of\nour study are also discussed.\n