ABSTRACT
The explosive spread of Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19) in late December 2019, requires the health authorities worldwide to enforced stricter standard operating procedures (SOP) for mass gathering events, which eventually caused postponement and cancellation. This has led to a great loss and bankruptcy for most event organizers. As an effort to offer solution to this matter, a professional touch producing "soft landing"such as "Mathematical Modelling of Physical Distancing Policy for Mass Gathering Event Organizer"was proposed. Therefore, a holistic understanding about the issues related to physical distancing in mass gathering event is required. This systematic review paper summarizes current practice of physical distancing among mass gathering event organizers. This study reviewed thirteen articles using two leading databases namely Scopus and Google Scholar. Based on thematic analysis, this review finalized four themes: 1) physical distancing method;2) the importance of physical distancing;3) challenges in physical distancing enforcement and 4) approach to monitor the compliance of physical distancing. © 2022 Author(s).
ABSTRACT
Mass gathering has been identified as one of the causes of fast-spreading of COVID-19. Physical distancing practices and large gathering control in Malaysia and all over the world are likely to be continued until the end of the year, even after Movement Control Order (MCO) has been lifted. This has imposed event organizers to redesign their events into virtual events where attendees are to stay at their houses and meet with the host and other attendees virtually. However, certain types of educational events or activities such as practical and hands-on classes are not to be virtually conducted as it by nature carries a competency for the students. This paper evaluates the standard classroom layout by comparing with optimal layout based on circle packing problem (CPP) solution. CPP solution is used to optimize the physical distancing-constrained for the student seat layout as in it happens in real life. The findings can provide an effective exit strategy for Malaysia to deal with this COVID-19 pandemic or other pandemics in the future. © 2022 Author(s).
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has received tremendous attention from scholars worldwide and even being labelled as a black swan event that has disrupted every aspect of human life. Within a short time span of the pandemic, a large volume of research pertaining to COVID-19 has been published in diverse research fields. This paper adopts a bibliometric analysis to systematically evaluate the research development in the application of optimization and simulation methods to address COVID-19 physical distancing policy (OSPhyD) using Bibliometrix R package. A textual query on Scopus database using the combination of four classes of keywords;covid-19, optimization, simulation, and physical distance has returned a total of 299 original research articles and reviews published in English. Appropriate visualizations were generated to describe the collaborations between different authors, countries, and institutions, whilst co-word analysis that uses text mining technique has produced a conceptual cluster via co-occurrence network map to underscore the emerging themes in the current research interest. The main findings pinpoint that: 1) OSPhyD as a scientific research field is an emerging multidisciplinary research topic that is growing progressively and steadily in the fields of medicine, engineering, social sciences, mathematics and decision science, 2) The field has attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world particularly from United States of America, United Kingdom, European countries including authors from Asia, and 3) Three dominant themes or research front emerged from the publications including COVID-19 mainstream, medical education and undergraduate. © 2022 Author(s).