Social Impacts of the COVID-19 Epidemic on the World: A Narrative Review of Reviews

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a major health problem that has had negative impacts on various aspects of people's lives. This study aimed to present a narrative review of reviews that have addressed the social effects of the COVID-19 epidemic. To achieve this goal, the Pubmed database was searched using keywords related to the fields of social implication, COVID-19, and review studies. Finally, 20 out of 61 articles were approved and their results were reviewed. In the field of education, numerous challenges were mentioned, such as inequality and lack of access to the necessary facilities to use virtual education, increasing workload, insufficient virtual education, negative impact on mental health, reduction in the quality of educator-learner communication, lack of technology knowledge of educators, reduced participation, activity and motivation of students, and ergonomic problems caused by the use of digital educational tools. In the field of violence, three dimensions of violence against women, children, and healthcare personnel were studied. The factors affecting this field included women's increased economic dependence, limited access to shelter, and increased economic pressure on men due to unemployment and losing jobs. Other problems caused by the epidemic involved the loss of breadwinners, unemployment, reduction in imports and exports, decrease in the gross domestic product, reduced access to food, and food insecurity