**1. Introduction**

Human beings have always been faced with a diversity of disasters for thousands of years. Some examples of natural disasters include earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, tornados, and the outbreak of diseases [1]. There are different definitions of outbreak disease, and the highest level is a pandemic which involves the worldwide spread of a new disease. Recently, the world faced a big threat highlighting a direct relationship with the mortality rate of human beings. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus [2]. Throughout history, humans experienced different pandemics such as Spanish flu, HIV, SARS, and now COVID-19. With the growth of medical science, technology, and science, the number of deaths was decreased considerably in comparison with the Spanish flu disaster. This could be a consequence of proper decision-making and rapid reaction. The coronavirus originated from Wuhan, Hubei province, China [3] and was reported to the World Health Organization at the last day of 2019 [4]. The spread of COVID-19 was incredibly fast, such that the outbreak was declared a pandemic late January 2020. Almost all countries are affected by the virus with effects on every aspect of people's lifestyle, in terms of social, economic, and other factors.

Due to fast spread of COVID-19, countries faced many limitations in their resources and capacities in order to treat the infected patients. Hospitals became one of the most dangerous locations for patients that are diagnosed with other diseases, since infected patients with COVID-19 increase the risk of virus outbreak even inside the hospitals. The information on high-ranked countries in terms of dead bodies shows that healthcare facilities play the most important role in saving peoples' life. For example, Germany managed the circumstance better than other countries with almost the same number of infected people with the help of a high number of hospitals and hospitality facilities in comparison with Spain or Italy. With a high level of quantitative human resources and facilities, taking care of the patient's situation will be better and it will increase the probability of saving patients. Therefore, healthcare policy-makers are proposing some recommendations toward building new temporary hospitals for COVID-19-infected patients. The establishment of hospitals includes many costs for governments and other stakeholders; thus, important decisions should be taken before each step. Although COVID-19 is a very dangerous and fast-spreading virus, decision-makers cannot only focus on medical capacities when they are planning to establish an exclusive hospital. Ignoring other involved factors may lead to other costs that may have an effect on patients and their process of getting cured. Therefore, location selection for a new a hospital is not only affected by only one factor or only medical-related factors. In other words, multiple location factors are also involved in the process of selecting a suitable location for hospitals. These factors integrate most technical, economic, environmental, and social aspects into the decision-making process in order to select the most appropriate location. COVID-19 increased the importance of the social, economic, and environmental aspects of the location selection process for a hospital during the current critical time. Therefore, decision-makers require reliable and robust decision-making tools which enable them to make decisions during the uncertain period that we are all in.

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are some of the frequently utilized decision-making tools that are well designed for complicated problems that involve multiple criteria with a need to prioritize the alternatives. MCDM methods enable decision-makers to evaluate number of alternatives with various data that are available such as crisp, fuzzy, interval, rough, etc. The criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) approach is one of the well-known MCDM methods, which is designed to determine the importance of criteria for an MCDM problem [5]. Unlike other MCDM methods that are focused on a weight determination process, the CRITIC method does not require separate pairwise comparisons for the criteria, since it uses the initial decision matrix that is constructed for the comparison of the alternatives. As one of the recently introduced powerful MCDM methods, the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method [6] is an MCDM method that enables decision-makers to prioritize the alternatives under multiple criteria. In this paper, we present a decision support framework to address the temporary hospital location selection problem under a gray uncertainty environment. A case study is performed for Istanbul which is one of the top cities in terms of the number of infected COVID-19 cases.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, a literature review of the applications of MCDM methods for the location selection problem is presented. In Section 3, the steps of the integrated decision-making framework are given. In Section 4, we perform a real-life case study in order to show the feasibility and applicability of the proposed methodology for the temporary hospital location selection problem in Istanbul, Turkey. Finally, we present conclusions in Section 5.
