Living With COVID-19: A Systemic and Multi-Criteria Approach to Enact Evidence-Based Health Policy

The lifting of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) lockdown requires, in the short and medium terms, a holistic and evidence-based approach to population health management based on combining risk factors and bio-economic outcomes, including actors' behaviors. This dynamic and global approach to health control is necessary to deal with the new paradigm of living with an infectious disease, which disrupts our individual freedom and behaviors. The challenge for policymakers consists of defining methods of lockdown-lifting and follow-up (middle-term rules) that best meet the needs for resumption of economic activity, societal wellbeing, and containment of the outbreak. There is no simple and ready-to-use way to do this since it means considering several competing objectives at the same time and continuously adapting the strategy and rules, ideally at local scale. We propose a framework for creating a precision evidence-based health policy that simultaneously considers public health, economic, and societal dimensions while accounting for constraints and uncertainty. It is based on the four following principles: integrating multiple and heterogeneous information, accepting navigation with uncertainty, adjusting the strategy dynamically with feedback mechanisms, and managing clusters through a multi-scalar conception. The evidence-based policy intervention for COVID-19 obtained includes scientific background via epidemiological modeling and bio-economic modeling. A set of quantitative and qualitative indicators are used as feedback to precisely monitor the societal-economic-epidemiological dynamics, allowing tightening or loosening of measures before epidemic damage (re-)occurs. Altogether, this allows an evidence-based policy that steers the strategy with precision and avoids any political shock.