Most cities of the world are under lock down and peoples are forced to self quarantine at their homes because of the pandemic coronavirus. This situation has created fear in many peoples and this fear has converted in to desperation for some people. This desperation has been seen in many reports where people fight over resources like sanitizers, food products and many products found in supermarkets and the fact that many products has become low on shelf implies that peoples are stock piling those products creating unnecessary shortage and increasing the difficulty of the nation. So besides working on the prevention, management and cure for the virus, it is important to work on economic and social aspect of the crisis. It is important for the society to maintain the value and order while waiting for the solution because if there is no system that allocates resources in pandemic crisis times, there will be chaos and this will bring negative effect on the process of solving the problem.

This project is about developing a temporary marketing mechanism that will be only implemented when there is national emergency such as the current coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. This new marketing strategy follows an online purchasing system from local supermarkets or stores that the purchasing mechanism basis on the number of family members per house number. This new online marketing mechanism integrates local supermarket or store stock with government database that have data of house number with number of family number. The government database also provides data like if there is special need for a certain family that requires them to get more than needed. Then the algorithm is integrated in the online purchasing system and end users purchase products based on limitation on the number of products they can by at once and on the frequency of the product they buy per some period of time or days. This will help on resource allocation big time and it automates the whole process saving time and primarily protecting the nation from possible chaos. This mechanism also assists in prevention of virus transmission due to crowd in supermarkets because there will not be any product on shelf that the purchasing system is online.

For more information please visit https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/health-security-pandemics/solutions/19658