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The lockdown measures to contain the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) in China in early 2020 was considered effective by the World Health Organization and many academics around the world. At the same time, the Western media labelled these measures as draconian. This research examined the reasons why the Chinese people were willing to support such measures. Based on an online survey of 528 Chinese participants, conducted in April 2020, the results revealed that the participants' instrumental attitudes (e.g., the outcome of the lockdown), but not experiential attitudes (i.e., the experience of the lockdown), were predictive of their support for a lockdown policy. Further analysis showed that those with higher communitarian worldviews had favourable instrumental attitudes and strong support regardless of the level of the perceived severity of the virus, whereas those with lower communitarian worldviews had more favourable instrumental attitudes and policy support when perceived severity was high than when it was low. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the infectious coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first reported in Wuhan, it has become a public health problem in China and even around the world. This pandemic is having devastating effects on societies and economies around the world. The increase in the number of COVID-19 tests gives more information about the epidemic spread, which may lead to the possibility of surrounding it to prevent further infections. However, wearing a face mask that prevents the transmission of droplets in the air and maintaining an appropriate physical distance between people, and reducing close contact with each other can still be beneficial in combating this pandemic. Therefore, this research paper focuses on implementing a Face Mask and Social Distancing Detection model as an embedded vision system. The pretrained models such as the MobileNet, ResNet Classifier, and VGG are used in our context. People violating social distancing or not wearing masks were detected. After implementing and deploying the models, the selected one achieved a confidence score of 100%. This paper also provides a comparative study of different face detection and face mask classification models. The system performance is evaluated in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, support, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy that demonstrate the practical applicability. The system performs with F1-score of 99%, sensitivity of 99%, specificity of 99%, and an accuracy of 100%. Hence, this solution tracks the people with or without masks in a real-time scenario and ensures social distancing by generating an alarm if there is a violation in the scene or in public places. This can be used with the existing embedded camera infrastructure to enable these analytics which can be applied to various verticals, as well as in an office building or at airport terminals/gates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health lessons from one pandemic become the planning assumptions for the next one. Aotearoa New Zealand's 2017 pandemic plan was derived from past experience of influenza. When Covid-19 emerged as a major global health threat, it took time for the realisation to crystallise that this infection was so different from influenza that it required a completely new pandemic response strategy. In this paper we describe how early evidence about SARS-CoV-2 transmission from China led to the adoption of an elimination strategy in Aotearoa New Zealand, making it the first country to choose elimination as a specific policy response. We discuss how further evidence has shaped the selection and design of Covid-19 pandemic control measures such as border restrictions, case and contact management, hygiene practices and use of face masks, physical distancing, and vaccines. This experience demonstrates the need for a different approach to the design of the next national pandemic plan. We identify key early evidence that will be required to develop a flexible and appropriate public health response to a new pandemic threat. We present a framework for a new pandemic plan that aims to learn from the Covid-19 experience by making as few limiting assumptions as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In the face of the global pandemic of coronavirus disease‐2019 (COVID‐19), people's adherence to precautionary behavioral measures (e.g. social distancing) largely influences the effectiveness of those measures in containing the spread of the coronavirus. The present study aims at testing the applicability of the health belief model (HBM) and generalised social beliefs (i.e. social axioms) to explore strategies for promoting adherence to COVID‐19 precautionary measures. Methods: We conducted a telephone survey with a two‐step stratified random sampling method and obtained a probability sample of 616 adults in Macao, China (18–87 years old; 60.9% women) in April 2020. Results: Our participants showed stronger adherence to some COVID‐19 precautionary measures (e.g. face mask wearing; 96.4%) but not others (e.g. social distancing; 42.3%). Their adherence to those measures was found to be significantly associated with four HBM factors and two social axioms, after controlling for gender, age, and years of education. Conclusions: The HBM and the generalised social beliefs of social cynicism and reward for application can be applied to understanding adherence to precautionary measures against COVID‐19. Strategies based on beliefs were proposed to facilitate the promotion of precautionary measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocacy of the use of facemasks by the public as a measure against the spread of COVID‐19 is controversial, with some healthcare professionals arguing that the use of a face mask may increase the rate at which people touch their faces, due to readjusting the mask. We assessed the facial touching behaviour of bus passengers in China before and after the outbreak of COVID‐19 and found that wearing a face mask does not increase the number of hand‐face contacts and is likely, therefore, to have a positive beneficial effect on suppressing the spread of COVID‐19 within populations when used in conjunction with social distancing measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]