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The breakout of the pandemic COVID-19 has affected numerous countries and territories worldwide. As COVID-19 specific medicines yet to be invented, at present the treatment is case specific, hence identification and evaluation of different prevalent treatment options based on various criteria and attributes are very important not only from the point of view of present pandemic but also for futuristic pandemic preparedness. The present study focuses on identifying, evaluation and ranking of treatment options using Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). In this regard, the existing literature, doctors and scientist were interviewed to know the current treatment options in vogue and the scale of their importance with respect to the criteria. The criteria taken are side effect, regime cost, treatment duration, plasma stability, plasma turnover, time of suppression, ease of application, drug-drug interaction, compliance, fever, pneumonia, intensive care, organ failure, macrophage activation syndrome, hemophagocytic syndrome, pregnancy, kidney problem, age. This study extended Hesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) to Generalized Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (GHFS). Generalized Hesitant Pentagonal Fuzzy Number (GHPFN) is developed. The properties of GHPFN are demonstrated. Two types of GHPFN has been described. The GHPFN (2nd type) along with MCDM tool Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) has been applied to rank the treatment options. The result of the study ranked 'Hydroxychloroquine' as the first alternative followed by, 'Plasma Exchange', 'Tocilizumab', 'Remdesivir' and 'Favipravir'. To check the robustness and steadiness of the proposed methodology, comparative analysis and sensitivity analysis has been conducted., (© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The outburst of the pandemic Coronavirus disease since December 2019, has severely impacted the health and economy worldwide. The epidemic is spreading fast through various means, as the virus is very infectious. Medical science is exploring a vaccine, only symptomatic treatment is possible at the moment. To contain the virus, it is required to categorize the risk factors and rank those in terms of contagion. This study aims to evaluate risk factors involved in the spread of COVID-19 and to rank them. In this work, we applied the methodology namely, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to find out the weights and finally Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (HFS) with Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied to identify the major risk factor. The results showed that "long duration of contact with the infected person" the most significant risk factor, followed by "spread through hospitals and clinic" and "verbal spread". We showed the appliance of the Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools in evaluation of the most significant risk factor. Moreover, we conducted sensitivity analysis., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2021 The Author(s).)