ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken many countries worldwide and forced them to take unprecedented public health restrictive measures to stop the spread of coronavirus infections. For any disease containment strategy to be successful, public willingness to comply with the restrictive measures is essential. In this paper, we report findings from a national online survey on the public perception of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. We show that individual compliance with restrictive measures is shaped by factors such as news consumption, trust in institutions, feelings of uncertainty, and belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the outbreak, in addition to demographic factors. We found that news consumption, information received on social networking sites and instant messaging platforms, trust in official sites, as well as education and gender could be the strongest predictors of Romanians’ willingness to comply. Furthermore, belief in conspiracies related to the coronavirus outbreak positively influences Romanians’ compliance with restrictive measures.

摘要

COVID-19 大流行震惊了全球许多国家，迫使它们采取前所未有的公共卫生限制措施来阻止冠状病毒感染的传播。要使任何疾病控制策略取得成功，公众遵守限制措施的意愿至关重要。在本文中，我们报告了一项关于公众对罗马尼亚 COVID-19 大流行的看法的全国在线调查的结果。我们表明，除了人口统计因素之外，个人对限制性措施的遵守还受到新闻消费、对机构的信任、不确定感和对围绕爆发的阴谋论的信念等因素的影响。我们发现新闻消费、社交网站和即时通讯平台收到的信息、对官方网站的信任、以及教育和性别可能是罗马尼亚人遵守意愿的最强预测因素。此外，相信与冠状病毒爆发有关的阴谋对罗马尼亚人遵守限制措施产生了积极影响。