COVID-19 lockdowns and a response model to health, economic and food anxiety
- PDF / 725,040 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 63 Downloads / 152 Views
COVID-19 lockdowns and a response model to health, economic and food anxiety Ashish Vazirani 1
&
Titas Bhattacharjee 1
Accepted: 17 November 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Pandemics create survival uncertainty through infection possibilities, food scarcity, and unemployment. Being the largest democracy in the world, we have explored the response of Indian citizens on the COVID-19’s lockdown and defined an anxiety response model using PLS based Structural Equation Modeling(SEM). For a comprehensive understanding, we have measured the response at two levels of individual and government. Though the types of anxieties are related, we observed that a specific response is linked with a specific type of anxiety and all responses are not anxiety-driven. We have found that the response mechanism of Health and Food anxieties follow very different paths and that the role of information is not significant in all anxieties. Our results will help policymakers in understanding how to respond to a crisis and optimize policy implementation accordingly. It will further help the scholars understand the difference in the anxieties caused by the pandemic and the layers of responses individuals take in such situations. Keywords COVID19 . Anxiety . Decision making . Information . Panic
Introduction COVID19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) is an acute respiratory illness with unknown causes that started in Wuhan, China on 17th Nov 2019 (Davidson, 2020; Paules, Marston, & Fauci, 2020). COVID19 virus capacity to spread and to cause mortality, forced nations to stop international travel, but within the first four months, infection grew across the globe with epicenters (Infected cases) in Italy (74,386), Iran (27,017), and the USA (68,489). To reduce the spread of infection, the WHO recommended to maintain self-hygiene and physical distance. Such viral infection can be disastrous for a populous country like India, which has a poor public healthcare (150 global rank: World Economic Forum) and where majority of the society is marginalized economically. To control the “people to people” spread, a systemic physical distancing through “lockdowns” became a reasonable temporary solution for the Governments. On 19th Mar 2020, the Prime Minister(PM) of India announced a single day lockdown on 22nd Mar, few officials reported it as a masterstroke to protect Indians, but
* Ashish Vazirani [email protected] 1
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
many, including PM, suggested the one-day lockdown as just the beginning of a long battle. Post announcement, media houses reported hoarding of food, and individuals were observed following the guidelines of wearing masks and using sanitizer. While researchers were still working out to conclude the effectiveness of an old-time malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine (HCQS) on COVID-19, the drug soon became unavailable in the local market as well as on India’s leading online pharma stores like 1 mg and PharmEasy. The effect of lockdown’s a
Data Loading...
