Special Issue on COVID-19 and Historical Pandemics Part 3

Three years have passed since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China. The pandemic rapidly spread worldwide, especially through Europe and the Americas. The Journal of Disaster Research (JDR) edited its “Special Issue on COVID-19 and Historical Pandemics, Part 1 and Part 2” at the end of 2020 and 2021, and their electronic versions were published in January 2021 (JDR Vol.16, No.1, pp. 1-117) and January 2022 (JDR Vol.17, No.1, pp. 1-158), respectively. However, the pandemic is still continued and not yet eradicated. The cumulative number of cases of COVID-19 worldwide, as released in the World Health Organization (WHO) Weekly Epidemiological Update was 260 million as of December 2021. We therefore planned for the publication of this Special Issue Part 3 and called for papers. This Special Issue Part 3 includes nine manuscripts, which deal from various fields related to COVID-19, such as including vaccine rollout program, the role of social media, problems in school education, therapeutic agents, virology, and general epidemiology. This suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is a complicated disaster. In December 2022, the global number of cumulative cases have increased to 940 million, almost one-tenth of the world’s population, although this number includes many asymptomatic infections. On the contrary, the number of new COVID-19 cases has slowed of mildness in the American and European countries in the year 2022, yet there has been a conspicuous increase in newly reported cases in Asia, especially in the Republic of Korea and Japan. Although the cases from African countries have still continued to report fewer numbers of cases than the number from other areas, However, there is still some possibility of that this is because of a lower number of medicinal tests, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, are given in African countries. If this is the reason, future increases of the medicinal tests in Africa may cause result in undesirable increases of in the number of cases therein African counties. We are hopeful that the COVID-19 pandemic will be eradicated in the next year, consequently no necessary for the rendering a Special Issue Part 4.