Track: Humanitarian Supply Chain Management for COVID-19

Abstract

With no vaccine available on the market, handling the COVID-19 pandemic is still a difficult problem to do. Preventive actions, such as wearing masks, distance guarding, frequent hand washing, and others are still the most important interventions in handling the transmission of this disease. Apart from disease transmission, the mortality rate is also something that has been widely studied to reduce its intensity. So far several countries have allowed the use of convalescent plasma transfusions (CPT) in the management of severe and critical patients. Although this method is a fairly old method and is often used for other diseases, so far there have not been many studies on the impact of using CPT for COVID-19. Several early studies of this use have yielded hopeful results with reduced mortality rates. In this paper, we show by using a simple model that uses CPT can also reduce the outbreak, in the sense of reducing the peak number of active cases and the length of the outbreak itself. The model used is the simplest discrete SIR and SEIR model. The completion of the model is done numerically through simulations on a spreadsheet.

Keywords

Pandemic COVID-19, SIR, SEIR, Discrete Equations, Convalescent Plasma Transfusions.