COVID-19 Stamps - A New Collecting Theme Vs Philatelic Promotion of Care for Affected Community and Environment (I)

The Coronavirus has reached its claws into every aspect of human activity, and philately is no exception. This is reflected both by decisions to cancel some philatelic issues, originally scheduled in the Editorial Plan of the Postal Administrations, in shifting the dates of appearance of other issues or editing new issues with the theme of the new Coronavirus. Starting from the attempts to investigate the philatelic appearances that have as concern the Coronavirus infection (COVID-19), the paper aim was to identify, index and describe them based on open-source databases, postal administration sites, respectively philatelic trade platforms. In this context, the focus was to familarise the reader with the diversity of philatelic issues related to COVID-19 emitted by different postal administration all over the world. As a result of searches in databases with open-source access to philatelic materials, an interesting series of pieces were identified, issued by the postal administrations of Iran, Vietnam, Switzerland, Isle of Man, Kingdom of Morocco and United Arab Emirates. Each philatelic piece was analyzed and described separately, in order to show what the international concerns about Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection really are.