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Whenever countries are threatened by a pandemic, as is the case with the COVID-19 virus, governments need help to take the right actions to safeguard public health as well as to mitigate the negative effects on the economy A restrictive approach can seriously damage the economy Conversely, a relaxed one may put at risk a high percentage of the population Other investigations in this area are focused on modelling the spread of the virus or estimating the impact of the different measures on its propagation However, in this paper, we propose a new methodology for helping governments in planning the phases to combat the pandemic based on their priorities To this end, we implement the SEIR epidemiological model to represent the evolution of the COVID-19 virus on the population To optimize the best sequences of actions governments can take, we propose a methodology with two approaches, one based on Deep Q-Learning and another one based on Genetic Algorithms The sequences of actions (confinement, self-isolation, two-meter distance or not taking restrictions) are evaluated according to a reward system focused on meeting two objectives: firstly, getting few people infected so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, and secondly, avoiding taking drastic measures which could cause serious damage to the economy The conducted experiments evaluate our methodology based on the accumulated rewards during the established period The experiments also prove that it is a valid tool for governments to reduce the negative effects of a pandemic by optimizing the planning of the phases According to our results, the approach based on Deep Q-Learning outperforms the one based on Genetic Algorithms © 2020 ACM
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