Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been significant variations in the level of adoption of public health recommendations across international jurisdictions and between cultural groups. Such variations have contributed to the dissimilar levels of risks associated with this world-changing viral infection and have highlighted the potential role of culture in assigning meaning and importance to personal protective behaviours. The purpose of this study is to describe the cultural factors during the COVID-19 pandemic that shaped protective health behaviours in the Chinese-Canadian community, one of the largest Chinese diasporas outside of Asia.
Methods
A qualitative descriptive design was employed. Content analysis was used to analyze the data from semi-structured virtual interviews conducted with 83 adult Chinese-Canadian participants residing in a metropolitan area in the Province of Ontario, Canada.
Findings
The cultural factors of collectivism, information seeking behaviour, symbolism of masks, and previous experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged as themes driving the early adoption of personal protective behaviours within the Chinese-Canadian community during the first wave of COVID-19. These protective behaviours that emerged prior to the first nation-wide lockdown in Canada included physical distancing, mask use, and self-quarantine beyond what was required at the time.
Conclusion
These findings have implications for the development of future public health interventions and campaigns targeting personal protective behaviours in this population and other ethnic minority populations with similar characteristics.
How risk is defined, the nature of methodologies used to assess risk, and the degree to which rare events should be included in a disaster risk analysis, are important considerations when developing policies, programs and priorities to manage risk. Each of these factors can significantly affect risk estimation. In Part 1 of this paper [Etkin, D. A., A. A. Mamuji, and L. Clarke. 2018. “Disaster Risk Analysis Part 1: The Importance of Including Rare Events.” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.] we concluded that excluding rare events has the potential to seriously underestimate the cumulative risk from all possible events,For example, of the 100 most expensive weather disasters in the US, the single most expensive event accounts for 16% of total economic impacts. Similarly, the worst explosion disaster accounts for 17% of the fatalities of the total 100 worst events. though including them can be very challenging both from a methodological and data availability perspective. Underestimating risk can result in flawed disaster risk reduction policies, resulting in insufficient attention being devoted to mitigation and/or prevention. In Part 2, we survey various governmental emergency management policies and methodologies in order to evaluate varying equations used to define risk, and to assess potential biases within disaster risk analyses that do comparative risk ranking. We find (1) that the equations used to define risk used by emergency management organizations are frequently less robust than they should or are able to be, and (2) that methodologies used to assess risk are often inadequate to properly account for the potential contribution of rare events. We conclude that there is a systemic bias within many emergency management organizations that results in underestimation of risk.
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