Fig. 4: The effect of different mitigation strategies on healthcare system performance indicators.

These indicators including staff availability, waiting time, total functionality, and the total number of hospitals overwhelmed days and the patients’ accessibility to medical services comprising ER, inpatient admission, ICU, and mechanical ventilators. The indicators are normalized by the reference case that used the US (S6) disease spread rates and assumed that the wildfire would occur 40 days after the disease outbreak. These normalized indicators are also compared with the normalized wildfire only and pandemic only scenarios and plotted as a range bar. These mitigation strategies are a applying stronger measures during the evacuation process, b provide more protections for the shelter residents, and c provide more protection for the frontline medical staff. We also show the effectiveness of other mitigation strategies we implemented in the analysis, including d replacing staff and e using non-acute care beds for non-critical inpatient cases. f We also present the optimization results for the location and number of different staffed beds needed for each of the considered disease spread scenarios.