An axiomatic approach towards pandemic performance indicators

Abstract

During a pandemic, each country (or region) is characterized by a status matrix indicating its positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths. A pandemic performance indicator is a real-valued mapping from the set of status matrices to the set of non-negative real numbers, whereby lower values stand for better performance. We show that four axioms together characterize a family of indicators arising from a weighted average of the incidence rate, morbidity rate and mortality rate. We use these indicators to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 in major countries worldwide.