Abstract:
Several pandemics such as the Spanish flu
; and Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome have come and gone with similar consequences felt after they were
contained. It can be suggested that a critical study of events after past pandemics
can help one make an informed guess about what to expect after the current
pandemic. Therefore, this paper aimed to examine the post
-events of past
pandemics to predict events after Covid
-19. Published articles were collected
and reviewed from scholarly literature
,
Web search engines
, and citation
databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. Information
gathering for this study was largely done in the second quarter of 2020 on
mainly Google Scholar with the final inclusion criteria word search being
pandemic, epidemic, plague, disease, crises, infection, viral, and outbreak
whiles the final exclusion criteria word search being science, scientific,
environment, biology, chemistry, law, and political
. Peer
-reviewed articles were
sorted and reviewed to contribute to understanding and developing a perspective
in assessing past pandemics and Covid
-19. Other authentic non
-peer
-reviewed
online sources were also searched, and their required information was also
considered. Literature was reviewed on historical pandemics, which killed many
people up to percentages of the whole population. Although all of them were
deadly, the three recent outbreaks were checked in
-depth, namely the 1918
Spanish Flu, Ebola, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The current
pandemic, as declared by the World Health Organization, is Covid
-19. This
study makes several predictions under different categories including: social,
psychological, economic, and global conditions, as well as the possible benefits
of Covid
-19. The findings encompass fear and paranoia among people, the
psychological need of survivors, stigmatization, growth in religious fanaticism,
stock market returns, increment in unemployment, higher cost of doing
business, impact on the global financial system, temporary dysfunction of
global supply chains, the cost to the world economy, increased interest in
infectious disease prevention, stronger bonding between humans and nations,
and advancement in clinical research.
