INTRODUCTION

At the end of 2019, a new coronavirus, SARS‐CoV‐2 causing coronavirus disease (COVID‐19), a severe respiratory illness like SARS and MERS, was first reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. By 21 February 2020, a total of 75,569 cases in China and 1,200 cases in 26 countries outside of China had been reported (World Health Organization, 2020a). The WHO declared Covid‐19 a public health emergency of international concern, and soon announced pandemic status (World Health Organization, 2020b). At the time of writing this editorial, more than 36 million Covid‐19 cases and over 1 million related deaths have been recorded globally (Johns Hopkins University, 2020).

From the beginning of the pandemic, preventive measures to halt the spread were put in place in most countries, such as guidance to wash or disinfect hands thoroughly and frequently, to keep physical distance, and to wear hygiene masks. In March and April 2020, many countries went into lockdown (e.g. India, Germany, and later the USA), urging or mandating citizens to stay indoors to halt the spread. Medical research on Covid‐19 expanded quickly, investigating the transmission routes (Bourouiba, 2020), developing diagnostic procedures and effective vaccines (Guo et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020) as well as treatments for Covid‐19 patients (Xu et al., 2020). While this research is very important, so are studies on the behavioral aspects of the pandemic as it is people’s behavior that we rely on to mitigate this public health crisis until an effective vaccine becomes available (Michie & West, 2020). Psychology has much to offer our enhanced understanding of people’s reactions and behaviors related to the pandemic, and to mitigate its impact on health and well‐being (Bavel et al., 2020). In this special issue, we are focusing on the early stages of the pandemic (January to May 2020). We aim to highlight 18 peer‐reviewed articles that offer unique insights into three key topics: (1) people’s health and well‐being during the early stages of the pandemic; (2) their coping strategies, and (3) people’s adherence to preventive measures. We hope that the results of the featured studies will inform future research on this important topic as well as informing evidence‐based practice to promote health and well‐being during the current and future public health emergencies.