Author
Listed:
- Karien Meier
- Toivo Glatz
- Mathijs C Guijt
- Marco Piccininni
- Merel van der Meulen
- Khaled Atmar
- Anne-Tess C Jolink
- Tobias Kurth
- Jessica L Rohmann
- Amir H Zamanipoor Najafabadi
- on behalf of the COVID-19 Survey Study group
Abstract
Background: The extent to which people implement government-issued protective measures is critical in preventing further spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Our study aimed to describe the public belief in the effectiveness of protective measures, the reported implementation of these measures, and to identify communication channels used to acquire information on COVID-19 in European countries during the early stage of the pandemic. Methods and findings: An online survey available in multiple languages was disseminated starting on March 19th, 2020. After five days, we computed descriptive statistics for countries with more than 500 respondents. Each day, we assessed enacted community containment measures by stage of stringency (I-IV). In total, 9,796 adults responded, of whom 8,611 resided in the Netherlands (stage III), 604 in Germany (stage III), and 581 in Italy (stage IV). To explore possible dynamics as containment strategies intensified, we also included 1,365 responses submitted during the following week. Participants indicated support for governmental measures related to avoiding social gatherings, selective closure of public places, and hand hygiene and respiratory measures (range for all measures: 95.0%-99.7%). Respondents from the Netherlands less frequently considered a complete social lockdown effective (59.2%), compared to respondents in Germany (76.6%) or Italy (87.2%). Italian residents applied enforced social distancing measures more frequently (range: 90.2%-99.3%, German and Dutch residents: 67.5%-97.0%) and self-initiated hygienic and social distancing behaviors (range: 36.3%-96.6%, German and Dutch residents: 28.3%-95.7%). Respondents reported being sufficiently informed about the outbreak and behaviors to avoid infection (range: 90.2%-91.1%). Information channels most commonly reported included television newspapers, official health websites, and social media. One week later, we observed no major differences in submitted responses. Conclusions: During the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, belief in the effectiveness of protective measures among survey respondents from three European countries was high and participants reported feeling sufficiently informed. In March 2020, implementation of measures differed between countries and were highest among respondents from Italy, who were subjected to the most stringent lockdown measures and greatest COVID-19 burden in Europe during this period.
Suggested Citation
Karien Meier & Toivo Glatz & Mathijs C Guijt & Marco Piccininni & Merel van der Meulen & Khaled Atmar & Anne-Tess C Jolink & Tobias Kurth & Jessica L Rohmann & Amir H Zamanipoor Najafabadi & on behalf, 2020.
"Public perspectives on protective measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy: A survey study,"
PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(8), pages 1-17, August.
Handle:
RePEc:plo:pone00:0236917
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236917
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0236917. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.