A Group Multi-Criteria approach for development of a country COVID-19 indicator

The pandemic generated by the Sars Cov 2 corona virus is monitored, at the level of each country, every day, by several COVID-19 indicators. The present paper proposes a Group Multi-Criteria (GMC) approach for the development of a country COVID-19 indicator called COPACOV (COuntry Performance Against COVID-19) indicator. It is calculated starting from several country COVID-19 indicators measured separately, in a set a countries. COPACOV can identify which countries are more vulnerable to COVID-19 illnesses from several points of view taken together. The GMC approach is based on a hybrid method composed from the Group Analytic Hierarchy Process (GAHP) weighting method and from the Multicriteria Optimization and Compromise Solution (VIKOR) multi-criteria method. The aggregation (consensus) of the experts' opinions, in the GAHP method is calculated with the geometric mean method. The VIKOR method uses the weights calculated by the GAHP method and calculates the COPACOV indicators. The proposed GMC approach is applied in a case study for a set of COVID-19 indicators and a set of Eastern European countries.