An epidemics–response–logistics model for mutual rescue during the early stage of unconventional epidemics

Efficient and rapid control of rapidly evolving and unconventional epidemics in the early stage plays a vital role in the whole cycle of epidemic prevention. This study introduces a novel epidemic management framework. It integrates epidemic evolution, government responses, and logistics processes to allocate limited intervention resources across geographic regions. We first design a general four-phase government response model to describe government behaviour during the early stage of controlling an unconventional epidemic. An improved epidemic model is subsequently developed to simulate the spread of infectious diseases. We introduce mutual rescue with a self-protect pattern to use limited resources best while considering both global prevention and self-protect. Finally, we propose an epidemics–response–logistics integration mathematical model. The case study of COVID-19 in Hubei Province shows that our proposed mutual rescue pattern can effectively reduce the number of infected individuals. Moreover, the analysis of the different measures of anti-epidemic and relevant parameters provides valuable suggestions for epidemic control. The proposed modelling framework can also be generalised to the prevention and control of the early stage of other unconventional epidemics.