Li Xiaoming, Liang Huigang
Department of Business Administration, Tennessee State University, 330 10 Ave. N, Nashville, TN 37203, USA.
Department of Business Information and Technology, University of Memphis, 3675 Central Avenue, Memphis, TN 38152, USA.
Comput Ind Eng. 2022 Oct;172:108602. doi: 10.1016/j.cie.2022.108602. Epub 2022 Aug 27.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has created turmoil around the world. To fight this ongoing global crisis and future ones, all stakeholders must collaborate and share timely and truthful information. This paper proposes a blockchain solution based on its inherent technological advantages. We posit that benefits can be derived from three unique blockchain features: bottom-up decentralization, automation with real-time update, and immutability with privacy preservation. A decentralized common platform provides easy access and increases participation in disease surveillance, which reduces the estimation errors of the compartmental model parameters. Automation with real-time update facilitates prompt detection and diagnosis, accurate contact tracing, and targeted mitigation and containment, achieving faster recovery and slower transmission. Being immutable while preserving privacy, the blockchain solution enhances respondents' willingness to truthfully report their contact history, avoiding false and erroneous data that will cause wrong estimates on pandemic transmission and recovery. Thus, the blockchain solution mitigates three types of risks: sample variance, delay, and bias. Through simulation, we quantify the value of the blockchain solution in these three aspects. Accordingly, we provide specific action plans based on our research findings: before building blockchain solutions for controlling COVID-19, governments and organizations can calculate the blockchain benefits and decide whether or not they should invest in such blockchain solutions by conducting a cost-benefit analysis.
当前的新冠疫情在全球引发了动荡。为应对这场持续的全球危机以及未来的危机，所有利益相关者必须合作并分享及时、真实的信息。本文基于区块链固有的技术优势提出了一种区块链解决方案。我们认为，可以从区块链的三个独特特性中获得益处：自下而上的去中心化、实时更新的自动化以及兼具隐私保护的不可变特性。一个去中心化的公共平台便于访问，并能提高疾病监测的参与度，从而减少 compartmental 模型参数的估计误差。实时更新的自动化有助于及时检测和诊断、准确的接触者追踪以及有针对性的缓解和遏制措施，实现更快的恢复和更慢的传播速度。区块链解决方案在保持隐私的同时具有不可变特性，提高了受访者如实报告其接触史的意愿，避免了会导致对疫情传播和恢复产生错误估计的虚假和错误数据。因此，区块链解决方案减轻了三种类型的风险：样本方差、延迟和偏差。通过模拟，我们量化了区块链解决方案在这三个方面的价值。据此，我们根据研究结果提供了具体的行动计划：在构建用于控制新冠疫情的区块链解决方案之前，政府和组织可以通过进行成本效益分析来计算区块链的益处，并决定是否应该投资于此类区块链解决方案。
