The uncertainty surrounding the extent of the global spread and the impact (or cost) of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s health and economies has been acknowledged by public health specialists and economists.
Apart from the confinement or lockdown measures by different governments, more needs to be done by individuals because behavioural responses are vital for containing the spread of COVID-19.
Evidence from previous studies on pandemics such as HIV and Ebola indicates that people respond to the possibility of contracting a disease by changing their behaviour. For HIV, people abstain, remain faithful to their partners and/or use condoms to protect themselves from getting the virus.
To avoid getting the disease (COVID-19) or to control its spread, people have changed their behaviour through increased self-protection. Self-protection measures include staying home, buying preventative medicine (or herbs), wearing facemasks, avoiding crowded places, avoiding sick friends, getting critical information about the disease (especially how it spreads), washing hands with soap and social distancing.
Therefore, because of the change (and the expected change) in people’s behaviour, it is important for the public health specialists to understand when and why people engage in self-protection so that they design optimal public health policies (during and after the lockdown) to control the spread of the disease. In addition, observing the change in people’s behaviour has implications for accurately measuring the actual (or close to the actual) cost of the disease and forecasting how the disease is likely to spread.
During epidemics (the when), several factors could explain why people change their behaviour. These include disease severity, the contagiousness of the disease, the infection rate, the mortality (or recovery) rate and the prevalence rate, among others. Globally, on average, there is conclusive evidence that COVID-19 is highly contagious, highly infectious and severe (or deadly). The evidence on the mortality/recovery rate and the prevalence rate is mixed across countries (making it hard to draw a conclusion).
Uganda has 79 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 52 people have recovered and the proportion of a population with the disease (prevalence) is still low. We immensely thank God for that. However, even with such outcomes, there is no room for complacency. It is important to continue monitoring not only the spread of the disease but also the behavioural response of people to the information about the recovery (mortality) levels and the prevalence levels. This would inform further policy actions by the government.
This is because evidence from past studies of epidemics shows that there is a reciprocal relationship between self-protection and disease prevalence (and mortality). The low prevalence (or mortality) tends to result in less self-protection leading to a high prevalence (or mortality), which results in more protection, and the cycle continues. This implies that if self-protection initiatives are successful then the prevalence would reduce and the public would respond by reducing self-protection, which would result in increased prevalence.
To illustrate this, as the COVID-19 cases increased, there was an increase in self-protection, but as the numbers stagnated and more people recovered, there was some complacency and reduction in self-protection measures by some people. Whereas the goal of disease control requires the elimination of any possibility of new infections, such complacency might result in new infections.
Therefore, there is some merit for individuals to stick to the self-protection measures even with reductions in the number of COVID-19 cases. During the lockdown, the best action by the government to contain the disease (through prevention and/or treatment) is likely to depend on people’s response to information about disease prevalence and mortality, thus the need for public health specialists to monitor people’s behaviour.
