Capturing the Differential Impacts of Easing COVID-19 Restrictions: Application of a Hybrid Model of Entropy and TOPSIS

Abstract

The paper aims to carry out the ordinal evaluation of 30 countries of North and South Americas, separately at two different points of time on 30th July 2020 and on 30th November 2020, on the basis of 13 select criteria. It also compares the changes in the relative rankings, if any, between these two points of time of the nations caused by changes in the pandemic mitigation strategy – i,e by easing the restrictions. The study has used the Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach for evaluation. The data analysis part has two major sections. The first section assigns weights to all of the thirteen criteria using the Entropy method. The second section uses the TOPSIS method of MCDA. The assigned weights indicate that two of the least important criteria are the counts of daily new cases per million population and the daily new deaths per million populations. The rankings of most of the nations differ on 30th November, 2020 over that on 30th July 2020. Changes in the values of these two criteria, in fact, caused the changes in the ordinal rankings of the nations. These two parameters represent the outcome of the COVID-19 mitigation efforts put forth by the nations. It also establishes that the COVID-19 mitigation strategy really matters when it comes to the ordinal ranking and performance appraisal of the nations. The novelty of the paper is that for the first time, the MCDA technique is used to analyse the impact of policy intervention in pandemic mitigation.