A fuzzy approach for prioritization of pharmacies to improve mask distribution process during COVID-19 pandemic—a pilot study for İstanbul

While the whole world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many different measures taken by countries. In this sense, the distribution of free masks to citizens between the ages of 20–65 in Turkey is one of the important measures taken against to spread of the pandemic. This distribution process is carried out through pharmacies and people can obtain their masks from any pharmacy in their area of residence. However, this situation may cause some pharmacies to be very busy, and thus social distance cannot be maintained and health and safety of the people may be threatened. In this paper, we aim to prioritize pharmacies so that only determined pharmacies in certain regions perform mask distribution process to prevent virus transmission. For this purpose, Esenler district is taken into consideration for a pilot study which is one of the risky regions in terms of virus spread in Istanbul, Turkey. Multi-criteria decision-making approach (MCDM) is used because of the necessity of handling many factors in decision-making process and the contradiction of evaluation factors in the prioritization of pharmacies. In order to best model the uncertainty in the decision process, the MCDM approach is applied in a fuzzy environment. In addition, spherical fuzzy AHP and VIKOR MCDM approaches are used as novel hybrid method in this paper. As a result of spherical fuzzy multi-criteria analysis, the pharmacies that need to provide free mask distribution in the Esenler region have been successfully identified.