The recent outbreak of COVID-19 disease caused by the new coronavirus first detected in Wuhan China, and its rapid spread around the globe, rekindled the attention of the world towards the effects of such epidemics on people’s everyday life. This happened in the past when the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” (SARS) in 2003 in mainland China, the “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” (MERS) in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, and the MERS in 2015 in South Korea (de Wit et al., 2016) took the scene.

As observed, this kind of epidemic can rapidly spread by a group of infectious agents through several methods of interactions and threaten the health of many people in a short time (Medina, 2018). These kinds of viruses, and their induced related epidemic crises, are having a great impact on every aspect of the economy, finance and society, raising new challenges in the field of epidemic disease prevention and mitigation.