Although some people were not infected by the COVID-19, they can still feel the impacts from multiple aspects. This study analyzed the impact of the COVID-19 situation based on a systematic review analysis. The impacts are widely spread from each focused aspect to affect many stakeholders and the involved organizations. For the health aspect, both patients and healthcare workers were impacted by COVID-19 directly and indirectly. For the direct effect, due to the COVID-19 situation, the accessibility to the healthcare system was hard to access. This can affect both patients and healthcare workers who regularly meet for some treatments. For the indirect effect, the COVID-19 situation also created much impact on the mental health of both patients and healthcare workers due to the lockdown policy and the reduction of health workers’ resting time. The health aspect had a great impact due to the COVID-19 situation, but the economic and tourism aspects suffered too. The policies for controlling and the severity of the COVID-19 situation affected both the economic and tourism industries. Before the COVID-19 situation, the tourism industry worldwide has received many investments and witnessed substantial growth. Many businesses tried expanding their businesses due to the higher demand. However, if the COVID-19 situation intensifies again, many businesses will need to cease operations or change their management system to adapt to the situation. The noticeable things that can indicate the COVID-19 impacts are the declining stocks and commodity markets in many countries and the reduction in the number of travelers worldwide, affecting multiple sectors, such as the tourism industry and aviation industry. Therefore, the impact of the COVID-19 situation on human life is inevitable.

Even though each focused aspect in this research has different impacts on the related stakeholders, these three aspects are somewhat connected. First, the initial causes of the three aspects are the same. Both COVID-19 prevention policies and the severity of the COVID-19 are the main cause for creating the impact based on the three aspects. Next, the economic and tourism impacts are clearly to be seen due to the viewpoint of the decrease in the demand of the consumers. The relationship between the economic and tourism aspects is still hard to match with the health aspects because the result of the systematic review is mainly focused on the mental health caused by the COVID-19 situation. However, this point can be connected based on the presence of some resilience of the COVID-19 severity. By the end of 2021, many ways were implemented to prevent and protect human lives from the COVID-19 based on the health aspect. COVID-19 vaccine is the main tool for preventing the sickness from the COVID-19 [74]. Many vaccines, such as the viral vector vaccine and mRNA vaccine, played a vital role in reducing the COVID-19 effects [75]. Therefore, after the resilience from the COVID-19 severity, multiple sectors, including the tourism industry, can also recover. Regarding this, the preliminary causal loop diagram can be created to show the connectedness among the three aspects, including how each effect is related to each other based on the focused aspects (Figure 3).

According to the proposed causal loop diagram shown in Figure 3, each effect is connected to other effect by the relationship arrow which can be identified by the positive and negative symbols [76]. The positive arrow indicates the positive relationship between the two effects. In contrast, the negative arrow is for the negative relationship between the two effects. The closed loop with an odd number of negative relationships is the Balancing loop (B) [76]. In this case, there are three main balancing loops—the impact of the COVID-19 based on the three aspects and the effect that can reduce the intensity of the COVID-19. Moreover, the Reinforcing loop (R) can be identified by the closed loop with an even number of negative relationships [76]. There is only one reinforcing loop in the causal loop diagram. It is the reinforcing outcome of the overtourism problem and the number of flight and tourists. Therefore, it can be determined that all three aspects have some connectivity based on functions and effects. The intensity level of COVID-19 is the main factor influencing all the focused aspects. However, the implementation of government and COVID-19 restriction policies, such as lockdown and travel restrictions, lead to a reduced impact on all focused aspects. One of the main reasons for impact reduction is a business adaptation in the supply chain and tourism sector. As a result, it can be demonstrated that the impact of COVID-19 on all three aspects reported in this study are connected to one another. Thus, the study findings are consistent with that of Purcell et al. [77], wherein the health and economic crises caused by COVID-19 show a negative impact on the travel and hospitality sectors. Additionally, the study of Purcell et al. [77] explained the relationship among the three consequences, which are health, economy, and tourism, using the sustainability concept; this concept was used to determine the approach to “Build Back Better” for all the three aspects. Furthermore, Sharma et al. [78] presented the resilience-based framework, which outlined how to transform the tourism and economic sectors that were severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

From the selected articles in the systematic review analysis, many studies have focused on using the previous pandemic with similar impacts to the COVID-19 situation as the base case for identifying COVID-19 impacts from multiple perspectives. SARS pandemic statistics reveal that around 8000 people were affected and less than 100 died in 29 countries [52]. Chang et al. [52] specified the impact of the previous pandemic situation, such as SARS, including some of the global financial crises on the commodity market, including fossil fuel and renewable energy. The analysis results indicate both the positive and negative effects on the fuel markets during these crisis periods. Additionally, Trans et al. [66] indicated the impact of the SARS on the tourism industry. The result of the analysis shows the substantial effects on the tourism industry during the SARS pandemic based on the reduction of 1.2% for the international arrival. Moreover, the result also shows that Asia’s region and the Pacific got higher effects than other regions. Based on this, even the effects of the SARS pandemic are lower than the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. A reason for COVID-19’s greater impact than the previous pandemic is the globalization or the expansion of the global economies and population [79]. Accordingly, it can show some signs of the possible effects of the future pandemic that might happen soon by using the previous pandemic, such as SARS and COVID-19, as the base cases.

Currently, most research and the government from many countries attempt to shift the focus from the phase of protecting to be the resilience phase, or from the response phase to the recovery phase according to the step of the disaster management cycle [80]. Based on this, the future trends for the COVID-19 consequence articles will be more about the approach to recover the economic, healthcare, and tourism situation together with the consequence modeling due to a large amount of data and information that keep increasing. The selected article provides many insights into the possible way to recover society, including the business, from the COVID-19 situation. Health aspects were one of the most remarkable concerns of the consequence of the COVID-19 situation because it can have a direct effect on the human body, which might cause deadliness. In this research, most of the focused articles mentioned the psychological consequence of the COVID-19 situation. The main causes of the mental health effects for both patients and healthcare workers are the number of workloads from the healthcare systems with the COVID-19 preventive policies from the government. Thus, to enter the recovery process, stakeholders must have some tradeoffs for compromising the restriction of the policy, but the COVID-19 effects can be long-term. Based on this, encouragement and good support for these people are the main keys to mitigating the mental health problem during the COVID-19 situation [27]. From the tourism perspective, most of the aforementioned recovery processes were focused on the adaptation of the business to handle the possible pandemic events by changing the way to conduct the business during a pandemic. Accordingly, a small amount of the research has tried focusing on how to eliminate the risk of another pandemic occurring because of its direct effects on the tourism industry [81]. Like the tourism perspective, the economic aspect also faced the direct effects of the COVID-19 situation, especially the business related to transportation (e.g., the aviation industry). One possible tool to avoid facing the direct hit of the COVID-19 situation is to adopt a new approach to conducting the business by focusing on how to conduct the business in the unexpected events that might happen in the future as in the case of the automotive industry [55]. Additionally, the stock market had some brightness in the dark during the time of the disasters. Some commodities, such as gold, were also a good hedging tool to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 [53].

Even though most of the current research trends related to the COVID-19 consequence focused on the response phase, the COVID-19 situation in December 2021 was still a concern of many countries due to the emerging COVID-19 new variants. Regarding this, most countries still paid attention to the consequence of the COVID-19, especially for health-related issues. Based on this, some countries were trying to tradeoff between increasing and reducing the level of the COVID-19 control policies that can create a good outcome for the health aspect if the level of the COVID-19 control policy is increased, but it might cause bad outcomes for the economic aspect.

This entry is adapted from Saengtabtim, K., Leelawat, N., Tang, J., Suppasri, A., & Imamura, F. (2022). Consequences of COVID-19 on health, economy, and tourism in Asia: A systematic review. Sustainability, 14 (8), 4624. doi: 10.3390/su14084624