COVID-19 Combating Strategies and Associated Variables for Its Transmission: An Approach with Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Techniques in the Indian Context

The virus COVID-19 is regarded as infectious and has been classified as a pandemic. Each country is taking precautions to lessen the rate of transmission after the virus spread to several countries. So far, a variety of strategies have been employed to combat the infection. Current broad-treatment, such as few limited vaccines are utilized as the main approaches in India, while the efficacy of various medications is yet uncertain. This research involved an exhaustive literature analysis, followed by interaction with healthcare specialists to identify the underlying vulnerabilities with the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Indian context. In this chapter, a novel effort was made by combining two ‘multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)’ methods, such as the ‘Best-Worst Method (BWM) and Step-Wise-Assessment and Ratio-Analysis (SWARA)’ in order to rank the significant variables that contribute to the spread of COVID-19. Initially, considering the existing availability, the main preferences of COVID-19’s vaccines (such as COVISHIELD, COVAXIN, and Sputnik-V) among the Indian community was done by the use of SWARA approach. Further, in order to rank the essential and significant variables that contribute to the spread of COVID-19 and according to how best to prioritize them, the associated significant variables were ranked using the BWM technique, and the associated sub-variables were ranked using the SWARA approach, which took into account the variable’s optimized-weight values when determining the final weight values of the corresponding sub-variables.