The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in over 1.4 million confirmed cases and over 83,000 deaths globally. It has also sparked fears of an impending economic crisis and recession. Social distancing, self-isolation and travel restrictions forced a decrease in the workforce across all economic sectors and caused many jobs to be lost. Schools have closed down, and the need of commodities and manufactured products has decreased. In contrast, the need for medical supplies has significantly increased. The food sector has also seen a great demand due to panic-buying and stockpiling of food products. In response to this global outbreak, we summarise the socio-economic effects of COVID-19 on individual aspects of the world economy.

Introduction

Labelled as a black swan event (1) and likened to the economic scene of World War Two (2), the outbreak of COVID-19 (the disease caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2)) has had a detrimental effect on global healthcare systems with a ripple effect on every aspect of human life as we know it. Sohrabi et al. highlighted the extent of the outbreak with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring the COVID-19 outbreak as a global emergency on 30th January 2020. (3) In a response to ‘flatten the curve’ (۴), governments have enforced border shutdowns, travel restrictions and quarantine (5,6) in countries which constitute the world’s largest economies, sparking fears of an impending economic crisis and recession. (7) In an attempt to understand the turmoil effect on the economy, we summarize the effect of COVID-19 on individual aspects of the world economy, focusing on primary sectors which include industries involved in the extraction of raw materials, secondary sectors involved in the production of finished products and tertiary sectors to include all service provision industries.