© 2020 Elsevier Ltd The study views the preventive measures undertaken by government to combat COVID 19 as stressor for individuals, and examines how individuals’ personal traits including emotional intelligence and personality factors influence their coping strategies. The concept of trait EI is used in this study to understand its relationship with personality factors and their respective effects on the opted outcomes. Coping strategies in this study are categorised into task, emotion and avoidance-oriented coping. The results show that emotional intelligence is significantly related to all coping strategies whereas only certain personality factors make unique variances. When both emotional intelligence and personality are in the same equation, with the latter being controlled, the former shows incremental variance and the influence of personality factors is reduced. Detailed discussion of these findings and implications for policy makers and researchers are highlighted and conclude the paper.