Strategies for COVID-19 Pandemic Recovery: Application of Engineering Asset Management Principles

Márquez, Adolfo Crespo

In this Chapter, several efforts that the SIM Research Group, from the University of Seville, accomplished during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in March-June 2020, are introduced. These efforts had an important impact on media and were mainly concern with the pandemic recovery phase. When confinement ends, recovery phase must be accurate planned at a local level. Health System (HS) capacity, specially ICUs and plants capacity and availability, would remain the key stone in this pandemic life cycle phase. This Chapter describes: First the important of the action plans design by local level, while a unique decision-making center is considered by country; Second, a management tool based on a ICUs and plants capacity model to estimate ICUs and plants saturation, and with these results, set new local and temporal confinement measures. The tool allows a dynamic analysis to estimate maximum Ro saturation scenarios; Third, a practical management tools to tackle the deconfinement strategy design problem. A proper control system to follow the course of action, especially in a scenario with unprecedent uncertainty, is developed. In all cases, it is remarked the importance of R (the pandemic basic and effective reproductive number), first as a variable to monitor and control the pandemic, to ensure its decline; second as a target to score risks associated to start certain activities over, after confinement. Reducing the potential increase in the value of R, when any type of activity is re-opening, guides the strategy. One common objective in these initiatives: Applying asset management principles to accelerate as much as possible socioeconomic normalization with a strict control over HS relapses risk.