The impact of COVID-19 on logistics and coping strategies: A literature review

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges to the continuous development of logistics and has received increasing attention from all sectors of society. This paper systematically reviews 85 related papers; sets the framework of literature analysis on the basis of five fields of logistics: life, e-commerce, healthcare, air transportation, and emergency; systematically composes and analyzes the scope and content of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on logistics in different fields; and comprehensively shows the current status of research on the impact of COVID-19 on the continuous development of logistics. On this basis, we combed out the diverse measures of government, enterprises, and related institutions for the logistics problems that have emerged, and put forward some prospects for future research in this field in terms of multi-period strategies, multi-factor evaluation, degree of impacts, and quantification of effects. The work in this paper has some reference value and significance for mitigating or eliminating the negative impact of COVID-19 on the continuous development process of logistics in multiple fields, rationalizing the epidemic response measures and expanding and deepening the research on this topic.