Understanding of COVID-19 had a significant direct effect on perceived severity. Finally, the integrated PMT and extended TPB of this study can be applied and extended to evaluate the perceived effectiveness of COVID-19 measures in other countries that are currently dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study is one of the first studies to have analyzed factors affecting the perceived effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention measures during the 2020 global pandemic. The purpose of this study was to evaluate factors affecting the perceived effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention measures among Filipinos during ECQ in Luzon, Philippines, by integrating Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The administration also implemented, through several platforms as preventive measures, strict social distancing ( Duddu, 2020, CSIS, 2020) and educated the community on healthy lifestyles. Thousands of police officers and military personnel were deployed at checkpoints to ensure that people complied with the lockdown. Border closures and entry bans were also enforced. Residents were not allowed to leave their homes except in case of emergencies. Under the ECQ, all modes of domestic travel, including ground, air, and sea, were suspended. This ECQ is widely known as one of the longest lockdown in the world. On March 16, 2020, The Philippine government imposed a total lockdown in Luzon, known as the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), as a preventive measure to minimize the COVID-19 outbreak. The Department of Health of the Philippines (DoH) reported 61,266 confirmed cases of the infection and 1643 deaths in the Philippines as of J( Figure 1Ĭonfirmed COVID-19 cases in the Philippines as of J( ). However, on July 16, 2020, the Philippines was declared to have the highest number of active cases in Southeast Asia ( Table 1 On March 17, 2020, the country was placed under community quarantine for six months ( CSIS, 2020). With few initial treatment medications, predicting the duration and final size of the virus in every country becomes critical for policymakers and public health authorities to prevent further spread of the outbreak.ĭespite the availability of different studies about preventive measures in other countries, there is a significant lack of academic research addressing the COVID-19 situation in the Philippines. At the moment, the only remedial option is hospitalization and thorough care management. Researchers are currently developing a vaccine as yet, there is no effective medicine that has been invented for the treatment of COVID-19 infections ( Paital et al., 2020). In addition, “#StayAtHome" was promoted by the media to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A massive lockdown has been implemented by governments in several countries. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization listed COVID-19 as a global pandemic.ĭue to the global pandemic of COVID-19, several prevention measures were taken. This virus outbreak has grown extensively to infect 13,575,158 people worldwide and has lead to 584,940 death cases as of J( WHO, 2020a, WHO, 2020b). Details about this epidemic were released by the National Health Commission of China on Janu( Wang et al., 2020). The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) recently named the novel coronavirus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2), which is now generally called coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) ( Gorbalenya et al., 2020a, Gorbalenya et al., 2020b). Later, Chinese researchers determined a human to human transmission of the virus and initially named the novel virus Wuhan coronavirus or 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) ( Adam et al., 2020). (2020) initially mentioned that patients who have been infected by the coronavirus in China might have gone to Wuhan where live animals were being sold. The virus was linked to a wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China, when an unknown pathogen was identified by the local hospitals in a group of patients who are accustomed to pneumonia ( Zhu et al., 2020, Fan et al., 2020). After the emergence of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in Saudi Arabia and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in China, a new SARS-like coronavirus was discovered last December 2019 ( Zhou et al., 2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19), a highly transmittable disease that threatens the human population worldwide, is considered to be the third pandemic in the 21st century ( Perlman, 2020).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |