Identifying Factors Affecting the Resilience of the Country Dealing with Pandemics Using System Dynamics Case Study: COVID-19 Disease

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic spread with a high outbreak speed in early 2020 and left many countries in crisis. This disease had many effects on different aspects of the country causing many challenges for the health system, economy, community, and education of societies, and only resilient communities could overcome this problem. Iranian community also experienced such challenges. Accordingly, this study was conducted to examine and identify factors affecting the government's resilience when dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural crisis. The data were collected through a fuzzy Delphi questionnaire distributed among 15 experts in the fields related to the research subject who were selected based on purposive sampling. Moreover, library documents and studies were used and finally, 23 important factors affecting resilience in social, economic, healthcare, education, logistics, infrastructural, media, and cyberspace scopes were gathered. Society resilience was presented based on the effective scopes of design and its corresponding scenarios using system dynamics analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that the most substantial components are economic ones, which have lower resilience rather than other scopes. Healthcare scope is in second rank, while education and social scopes are at last rank playing a significant role in resilience.