How do you perceive COVID-19?

Health Belief Model (HBM) is an important tool to assess the perception of a disease in the community. HBM talks about how we perceive the threat of a disease, how we evaluate the behavior towards this threat and how actions are moulded based on our perceptions.

HBM therefore can also be applied to current situation to assess the perception of people regarding COVID-19. A small description of the model has been developed for COVID-19 based on the understanding and assessment of the people around us.

The action for prevention of COVID-19 is dependent upon the perception of the threat of this disease. The perception about threat of disease is based on perceived susceptibility and perceived severity of COVID-19. People who do not perceive COVID-19 as a serious illness or as just a mild flu often end up with risky behavior like not wearing mask, not practicing physical distancing, not taking proper measures for hand wash or sanitization. On the other hand, people who perceive coronavirus as a serious threat, tend to practice health promoting behavior like wearing mask, maintaining physical distancing, proper hand wash and sanitization. People who do not perceive COVID-19 as serious illness often perceive that they are not susceptible to be contracted with coronavirus as they may believe that they have good immunity against it. On the contrary, people who perceive COVID-19 as serious illness perceive that they are susceptible to be contracted with coronavirus due to their lower immunity, or because of people around them (who do not practice precautionary measures). They also perceive it as serious illness due to the direct and indirect consequences, wherein direct includes medical complications/death and indirect consequences include financial loss due to hospitalization, loss of salary/wage due to prolonged quarantine time.

The evaluation of the behavior of the threat defines how people perceive the benefits of health promotion behavior and how they overcome the barriers which prevent in adopting health promoting behavior. People often complain about difficulty in wearing mask or they are missing their friends and family. Overcoming such barrier is possible when they are made to realize that the discomfort of not wearing a mask is just a miniscule of problem when compared to complications due to COVID-19 or financial loss due to hospitalization/quarantine or social stigma adhered to COVID-19.

These perceptions about COVID-19 are dependent upon mainly three types of variables- demographic (age, gender, education etc.), psychosocial (personality of an individual, friends and their ideologies etc.) and structural (knowledge about COVID-19 like precautions to be taken, symptoms about COVID-19 etc.). For example, people are seen not wearing mask or not practicing physical distancing due to peer pressure. They in turn perceive that COVID-19 is not a serious illness, which leads to risky behavior and propagates the spread of COVID-19.

The actions like health promoting behaviors or risky behaviors are also related to cue to actions and self efficacy. Cue to actions includes cues from health care workers, friends, and social media messages like wearing mask is important to prevent COVID-19. These are known as external cues. Example for internal cue is compliance for wearing mask when a person has developed slight irritation in throat. These external and internal cues help in reiterating health promotion behaviors. Self efficacy is the efficiency of a person in executing these health promotion behaviors in prevention of COVID-19 i.e. how well a person can endure health promotion behavior until the pandemic is over.

Therefore our perception about COVID-19 will help in fighting this pandemic and it is important to keep sharing important information regarding the disease to ensure that health promotion behaviors are effectively practiced.

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