A Novel Approach in Determining Areas to Lockdown during a Pandemic: COVID-19 as a Case Study

In December 2019, the Novel Coronavirus became a global epidemic. Because of COVID-19, all ongoing plans had been postponed. Lockdowns were imposed in areas where there was an excessive number of patients. Constantly locking down areas had a significant negative influence on the economy, particularly on developing and underdeveloped countries. But the majority of countries were locking down their areas without making any assumptions where some were successful and some were failures. In this situation, this paper presents a novel approach for determining which parts of a country should be immediately placed under lockdown during any pandemic situation while considering the lockdown history at the time of COVID-19. This work makes use of a self-established dataset containing data from several countries of the world and uses the successful presence of lockdown in that area as the target attribute for machine learning algorithms to determine the areas to keep under lockdown in the future. Here, the Random Forest algorithm has provided the highest accuracy of 92.387% indicating that this model can identify the areas with an impressive level of accuracy to retain under lockdown.