COVID-19 Pandemic and Government Policies to Control its Situation in Pakistan

Ali, Raja Waqar; Akram, Muhammad Adnan; Haider, Mobeen; Nazir, Imran; Manan, Abdul; Faisal, Muhammad

doi:10.31080/asmi.2020.03.0626

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…On 26 February 2020, the Pakistan Ministry of Health reported the first confirmed COVID-19 case in Karachi. Another case was confirmed in Islamabad on the same day by the Ministry of Health [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Assessing Public Willingness to Wear Face Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Fresh Insights from the Theory of Planned Behavior

Irfan

Akhtar

Ahmad

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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Face masks are considered an effective intervention in controlling the spread of airborne viruses, as evidenced by the 2009′s H1N1 swine flu and 2003′s severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreaks. However, research aiming to examine public willingness to wear (WTW) face masks in Pakistan are scarce. The current research aims to overcome this research void and contributes by expanding the theoretical mechanism of theory of planned behavior (TPB) to include three novel dimensions (risk perceptions of the pandemic, perceived benefits of face masks, and unavailability of face masks) to comprehensively analyze the factors that motivate people to, or inhibit people from, wearing face masks. The study is based on an inclusive questionnaire survey of a sample of 738 respondents in the provincial capitals of Pakistan, namely, Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi, Gilgit, and Quetta. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to analyze the proposed hypotheses. The results show that attitude, social norms, risk perceptions of the pandemic, and perceived benefits of face masks are the major influencing factors that positively affect public WTW face masks, whereas the cost of face masks and unavailability of face masks tend to have opposite effects. The results emphasize the need to enhance risk perceptions by publicizing the deadly effects of COVID-19 on the environment and society, ensure the availability of face masks at an affordable price, and make integrated and coherent efforts to highlight the benefits that face masks offer.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Assessing Public Willingness to Wear Face Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Fresh Insights from the Theory of Planned Behavior

Irfan

Akhtar

Ahmad

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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“…All provinces started lockdown in March 2020, and that two months-long imposed lockdown was lifted on 9th May 2020 (International Crisis Group, 2020). Different strategies were adopted by the government to combat the disease; one of the strategies is building a so-called tiger force consisting of Pakistani youth (Akram, 2020). A Corona Relief Tiger Force was constituted by the prime minister of Pakistan, comprised of Pakistan's youth in all provinces to support the police, civil servants, and health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adequacy of preventive measures, awareness, and attitude regarding the COVID-19 pandemic among university pharmacy students

Tariq

Baig

et al. 2020

Pharm Educ

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Introduction: The aim was to investigate the adequacy of preventive measures, awareness, and attitudes of pharmacy university students in the Punjab province, Pakistan, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: This cross-sectional survey was designed at a private university in Faisalabad, Pakistan. The questionnaire was developed on Google forms and distributed to students of five universities in the Punjab province via WhatsApp groups. Results: The comparison of COVID-19 knowledge for specific questions showed that non-pharmacy students (NPS) had significantly better knowledge about the source of the virus (p<0.001), while pharmacy students (PS) had better knowledge regarding COVID-19 treatment (p=0.01). The PS’s perception of the dangerousness and risk of contracting COVID-19 infection was better than NPS’s perception (p=0.026; p=0.019, respectively). The regression analysis revealed that the knowledge score was negatively associated with the female gender, and females were less likely to have a positive attitude. Conclusion: The authors’ results suggest that PS had good knowledge, positive attitude, and preparedness towards COVID-19. However, there are still misconceptions and confusion about the disease.

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“…Prior research on Covid-19 in Pakistan have focused on awareness of disease among health care workers (Alwani et al, 2020;S. Khan et al, 2020;Saqlain et al, 2020) and public (Javaid1 and Javaid3, 2020;Mirza et al, 2020), challenges faced by country (Mamun and Ullah, 2020), infection control measure (Hassan et al, 2020;Massan et al, 2020;Mukhtar, 2020;Waqar Ali et al, 2020), illness (Hashmi and Saleem, 2020) and treatment (Ilyas et al, 2020). However, this outbreak highlighted the fragility of psychological strength, and we also need to pay attention to attitudes of ordinary people during an epidemic (Liu et al, 2020).…”

Section: Government Strategies Towards Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Panic to Playfulness: A Journey Through the Covid-19 Pandemic (Preprint)

Talpur,

Laghari 2nd,

Talpur 3rd

et al. 2024

Preprint

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BACKGROUND On 30th January 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced the Covid-19 outbreak to be the sixth emergency services public health (SPHEC) epidemic (Waris et al., 2020). Federal Ministry of Health in Pakistan confirmed the first case of Covid-19 on 26th February 2020, in a Pakistani student returning from Iran. Over span of 15 days, 20 confirmed cases were diagnosed with Covid-19 in the province of Sindh, where highest numbers of cases were reported (Waris et al., 2020). On 27th June 2020, the numbers have reached to 198,883 confirmed cases with 86,906 recoveries and 4,035 deaths in the country . Geographically, Pakistan occupies a place of considerable significance, bordered on the west by Iran and on the northeast by China, where the number of cases and deaths during the pandemic remained enormously high, and eventually this became a major reason for the start of pandemic in Pakistan (Javed et al., 2020). Ergo, WHO officials have expressed grave concern over Pakistan that might become the next epicentre of Covid-19 pandemic (Qazi et al., 2020). OBJECTIVE Objective: To asses different tonal behavior of people towards Covid-19 in online social media, Twitter. METHODS Methods: In our study we used Whissell Dictionary of Affective Language (WDAL) to categorize people’s emotions in terms of their activeness, passiveness, and imagination towards current outbreak. Present study looked at general population of country, which then naturally split in three types of account; namely, general users, news, and organizations. RESULTS Results: Organizations' response to Covid-19 on social media is more conscientious, active, and they are determined to take an appropriate action to stop this outbreak in any way possible. General users on other hand on Twitter have taken this outbreak nonserious and making fun of it. Although news accounts had posted nice messages together with unpleasant messages in our dataset, yet there is no positive attitude by general public towards taking serious steps to avoid Covid-19 spread. CONCLUSIONS Conclusion: Our results suggest, general public is being ignorant with regard to spread of virus despite strict measures taken by the government and positive and negative framing provided by news or journalists. Present research focused on English written tweets only. However, studying behavior people who write tweets in Urdu and the role of influential spreaders on online social media towards Covid-19 remained unsolved.

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COVID-19 Pandemic and Government Policies to Control its Situation in Pakistan

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Assessing Public Willingness to Wear Face Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Fresh Insights from the Theory of Planned Behavior

Assessing Public Willingness to Wear Face Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Fresh Insights from the Theory of Planned Behavior

Adequacy of preventive measures, awareness, and attitude regarding the COVID-19 pandemic among university pharmacy students

From Panic to Playfulness: A Journey Through the Covid-19 Pandemic (Preprint)

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