Mass testing against COVID-19: a logistic simulation model to design and manage swab test clinics

COVID-19 pandemic caused several million deaths worldwide since the beginning of 2020. One of the most effective activities to contrast its diffusion is the execution of mass testing campaigns to track the virus spread. To design an efficient logistic system for such purpose, it is important to correctly plan the clinic layout and size the medical resources involved in the swab testing campaign, to avoid long patient queues or personnel underutilization. This paper describes the development of an original logistics simulation model to support the planning and design of clinics for the walk-in mass testing campaign against COVID-19 performed by South Tyrol Health Agency in just one weekend in November 2020 which involved more than 350’000 citizens. The developed model represents the targeted physical system considering all the different phase of such healthcare process. Furthermore, the duration of the multiple process phases is statistically distributed according to a large dataset collected during the COVID-19 testing campaign for touristic operators conducted in September and October 2020 in South Tyrol. The simulation model virtually evaluates the swab testing clinics with different parameters to determine the best scenario to be implemented. It concerns the number of medical resources allocated, the necessary clinic spaces and the time spent inside the clinic by each patient. The obtained results suggest that the so-defined configuration is distinguished by an average throughput of 8.8 minutes per patient. This clinic prototype has been replicated and set-up all over South-Tyrol territory to reach the targeted number of tested citizens. Indeed, 362’050 people were effectively tested from 20th to 22nd November 2020 leveraging 184 clinics and about 1400 healthcare co-workers, both medical and non-medical personnel. 3’615 Covid-positive people were detected and the virus transmission index of this Province fell from 1.22 to 0.74 just in the following 2 weeks.