Table 2.

Crisis stages of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Crisis Stage	Definition	Start of Stage	End of Stage
Prodromal	This comes before the actual crisis, and its main focus is to prevent or delay the crisis from happening.	The start of the current analysis	The first confirmed COVID-19 case
Acute	This stage follows the prodromal stage. It is signaled by the sudden onset of the event, and the event often develops rapidly. The main goals lie in controlling the crisis and avoiding its deterioration.	The first confirmed case	28 days after the last case of local transmissions a
Chronic	The crisis situation begins to ease in this stage and its appearance is less dramatic in appearance. As such, the focuses should be on relieving controlling measures, reducing damage and initiating the steps towards recovery.	The first day after the acute period	The end of the current analysis
Crisis Resolution	The crisis is over in this stage. Learnings should be synthesized for preparing the responses to future crises and the society/organization is returning to normal.	Not applicable (since the world is still in the middle of the pandemic at the time of writing, this stage is not applicable).

^a The end of an outbreak can be declared when there are no infections after two incubation periods (28 days for SARS-CoV-2) as commonly used in other research [35,36].