Ranking the Infection Risks of RNA Viruses with the Fuzzy PROMETHEE Method

RNA viruses circulate within the population leading to the development of outbreaks in different geographies. After COVID-19 pandemic, there is a raised concern of RNA viruses leading to the pandemic. In this study 14 different RNA viruses were analyzed. This study was carried out by evaluating different characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF), Zika virus, Yellow fever virus, Ebola virus, Influenza A H1N1, Influenza A H3N2, Influenza A H7N9, Influenza A H5N1, West Nile virus, Dengue virus and Chikungunya virus by using Fuzzy Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach. The criteria used for the analysis included the presence of vaccination, specific or non-specific treatments, presence of any past co-infection in the literature, reservoirs, transmission routes, whether the disease can be experienced with or without symptoms, mutation rate, R naught (Ro) values and mortality rates of each particular virus. The importance degrees of the criteria are determined by the experts in microbiology field using a fuzzy linguistic scale. The gaussian preference function is used to compute the difference between the alternatives for each criterion. The results indicated that amongst the 14 RNA viruses analyzed, the Zika virus possessed the highest infection risk followed by Chikungunya and CCHF. Although the Zika virus is currently attracting a little attention from the world community; the model suggests that the Zika virus is highly likely to be a silent threat.