Abstract
This paper attempts to investigate the effects of 2020 Covid-19 world-wide spread on stock markets of GCC countries. Coronavirus spread has been measured by cumulative cases, new cases, cumulative deaths and new deaths. Coronavirus spread has been measured by numbers per million of population, while stock market return is measured by Δ in stock market index.
 
 Papers conducted in this topic tend to analyze Coronavirus spread in the highly infected countries and focus on the developed stock markets. Countries with low level of infection that have emerging financial markets seem to be less attractive to scholars concerning with Coronavirus spread on stock markets. This is why we try to investigate the GCC stock markets reaction to Covid-19 spread.  
 
 Findings show that there are significant differences among stock market indices during the research period. Besides, stock market returns seem to be sensitive to Coronavirus new deaths. Moreover, this has been confirmed for March without any evidence about these effects during April and May 2020.
Highlights
The 20th century witnessed two pandemics since the historic Spanish Influenza of 1918, the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968
Results indicates that Stock Market Return (SMR) is sensitive only to New Coronavirus Deaths (NCD) in March
This may shed a light on the behavior of stock market in response to informational content regarding Coronavirus spread, where Coronavirus Cumulative Cases (CCC), New Coronavirus Cases (NCC) and Cumulative Coronavirus Deaths (CCD) haven’t been considered as bad news
Summary
The 20th century witnessed two pandemics since the historic Spanish Influenza of 1918, the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. The 21st century has seen four pandemic outbreaks: bird flu (N1H1) in 2009, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, and Ebola in 2013 Nanto (2009) summarized the four phases of the global financial crisis as follows: contain the contagion and strengthen financial sectors; coping with macroeconomic effects; regulatory and financial market reform and dealing with political, social, and security effects. Orlweski (2008) identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis as follows: the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis; the proliferation of credit risk, with the broadening of losses of financial institutions; the eruption of liquidity crisis; the commodity price bubble and the ultimate freeze of credit markets Each phase has a policy focus, each phase of the crisis affects the others, and, until the crisis has passed, no phase seems to have a clear end point. Nanto (2009) summarized the four phases of the global financial crisis as follows: contain the contagion and strengthen financial sectors; coping with macroeconomic effects; regulatory and financial market reform and dealing with political, social, and security effects. Orlweski (2008) identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis as follows: the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis; the proliferation of credit risk, with the broadening of losses of financial institutions; the eruption of liquidity crisis; the commodity price bubble and the ultimate freeze of credit markets
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