ABSTRACT
The team orienteering problem is a routing problem belonging to the class of the vehicle routing problems with profits. We present two problems arising in the health care logistics that are modelled as team orienteering problem. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first applications to health care logistics problems. The former is a problem arising in the digital contact tracing system as a measure for the containment of the Covid-19 pandemic. The latter is a problem arising in post-disaster management to transport the injured to hospitals. We discuss the novelty of some of their features with respect to the current literature. We present and discuss the mathematical formulation of a new variant of the team orienteering problem that includes such new features. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Since the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been declared a pandemic, the possibility of recurrence of the disease after recovery has become a debated issue. We report a case of an 84-years-old male patient who was admitted to our hospital for dyspnea and fever. Lab and clinical workout showed that he had COVID-19. After a full recovery of symptoms and a double negative nasopharyngeal swab of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by realtime polymerase chain reaction assay, he was discharged from the hospital. One month later, he developed dyspnea and fever again with lung involvement. Surprisingly, the nasopharyngeal swab of SARS-CoV-2 was positive. Since he denied contacts with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, he probably experienced a reactivation of a persistent infection. The failed eradication of the virus could depend on both virus' escape mechanisms and dysfunctional immune response. Further studies are needed to confirm the hypothesis of viral reactivation and identify signs of an incomplete clearance.