Socio-economic effects of COVID-19 – a study of the University students and teachers in Pakistan

Background: Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID–19) has appeared as a deadly pandemic affecting most of the countries across the world. The disease has caught humanity unprepared; therefore, there has been a lack of awareness about the causes, and transmission and mortality rates. It has also affected the overall socioeconomics from individual to worldwide levels. COVID-19 is an unprecedented and first-time challenge for Pakistan and a lockdown imposed by the Government of Pakistan has further devastated the economy of the country. This online survey was conducted to know the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the social life and economic status of the people of Pakistan. In this article, we mainly focused on teachers and students from different Universities of Pakistan for data generation because they can provide better information due to the use of modern technologies as a source of information.Methods: An online questionnaire survey covering 11 parameters including age, gender, employment status, mortality rate, education, marital status and, information about the pathogen responsible for the disease was filled by 1260 individuals from Pakistan.Results: The results obtained show that 56.6% of the responders were males,43.4% were females, 59.9% were unmarried, 37.7% were graduate students and, 48.7% unemployed. Most of the responders (55.6%) said that COVID-19 negatively affected the jobs of the people. We found (93%) of the responders with good knowledge about COVID-19.Conclusion: We conclude from the results that most of the responders were males, educated and they knew the pathogenic effect of the COVID-19 virus on humans. These results also show that the disease has drastically affected the economy and social life of the people of Pakistan.Keywords: Coronavirus; COVID-19; Knowledge; Socio-economic; Pakistan