Social and Economic Effects of Pandemics
Even though the Spanish Flu reached its peak near the end of the First World War, the economic and social effects on established activities were the most important (Barro and Ursa, 2008; some authors suggest that the impact may have been greater than reported). Barro et al. (2020) focused on the macroeconomic effects of pandemics, particularly the Spanish Flu and COVID-19. They defined these effects as a collective decline of approximately 10% in real GDP per capita over a clearly defined period. As a result, the Spanish Flu, the first world war, and the second world war had the greatest effects on the macroeconomic system in recent history. The authors assert that the current pandemic is edging closer to breaking through, despite the fact that the 1918 Spanish flu was the next significant negative macroeconomic impact on the global scale. According to Reuters (2020), additional reports have linked the Coronavirus’s economic decline to World War II. Naturally, the current COVID-19 pandemic is unusual from an economic standpoint. According to Baldwin and Weder di Mauro (2020), countries that were more or less economically fragile at the time felt the effects of previous pandemics, whereas the current pandemic is primarily felt by the economic juggernauts of our time. Economic superpowers have attempted to “flatten the epidemic curve” by implementing “containment” and “mitigation” measures in response to the virus’s ever-increasing incidence (WHO, 2009) These include a general lockdown of public events, restrictions on travel, border closures, isolation, and quarantine, raising concerns about an impending recession and economic collapse (Ozili and Arun, 2020). Flattening the pandemic curve in Figure 1 Detmer et al. 2021 (https://relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/Coronavirus-Guidelines/2355041/all/Epidemic_Epi_Curves_for_Coronavirus_COVID_19) serves as the source for this information. The significance of the pandemic’s mitigation and containment measures is shown in Figure 1. Even though these measures help reduce the maximum number of cases and, as a result, the number of deaths caused by the pandemic, they also make the pandemic last longer and have an impact on the economy. According to research based on previous pandemic experiences (Bermejo, 2004; Arndt and Lewis, 2001), economic and social activities such as agriculture, education, mental health, and so on are negatively impacted by the anxiety and isolation that accompany these outbreaks.