| Summary: | This research asks how an epidemic affects human behaviour. Probably the COVID-19 contagion is the most adverse global public health, economic, social, and technological stress since the Second World War. It affects almost all countries and challenges the globalisation particularly the global supply chain. The research community struggles with the multidimensional consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus infections. The critical goal is to quickly implement an efficient vaccine, as the society faces a tradeoff between death exposure and the size of the economic downturn. With this paper, we search for factors affecting contagion, mortality, and the time span between the country virus inception and first death. Additionally, we analyse the development of social media and financial markets. We applied a panel data set on all of the countries across the globe from 31 December 2019 until 31 March 2020 to investigate the patterns of epidemic development. We examined 7,642 country-daily data. We constructed classification tree regression, panel, and cross-sectional regression models. Our results support the conclusion that: 1) the speed of severity and contagion is different between themselves and across continents, 2) financial markets and social media respond differently to factors affecting contagion and severity, and 3) the time span between the first contagion in the economy and first death case cannot be plausibly explained with time-invariant variables. This research supports the policymakers with robust data for the informative allocation of scarce resources.
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