Key factors affecting people’s unwillingness to be confined during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain: a large-scale population study
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Abstract
Population confinements have been one of the most widely adopted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented by governments across the globe to help contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. While confinement measures have been proven to be effective to reduce the number of infections, they entail significant economic and social costs. Thus, different policy makers and social groups have exhibited varying levels of acceptance of this type of measures. In this context, understanding the factors that determine the willingness of individuals to be confined during a pandemic is of paramount importance, particularly, to policy and decision-makers. In this paper, we study the factors that influence the unwillingness to be confined during the COVID-19 pandemic by the means of a large-scale, online population survey deployed in Spain. We perform two types of analyses (logistic regression and automatic pattern discovery) and consider socio-demographic, economic and psychological factors, together with the 14-day cumulative incidence per 100,000 inhabitants. Our analysis of 109,515 answers to the survey covers data spanning over a 5-month time period to shed light on the impact of the passage of time. We find evidence of pandemic fatigue as the percentage of those who report an unwillingness to be in confinement increases over time; we identify significant gender differences, with women being generally less likely than men to be able to sustain long-term confinement of at least 6 months; we uncover that the psychological impact was the most important factor to determine the willingness to be in confinement at the beginning of the pandemic, to be replaced by the economic impact as the most important variable towards the end of our period of study. Our results highlight the need to design gender and age specific public policies, to implement psychological and economic support programs and to address the evident pandemic fatigue as the success of potential future confinements will depend on the population’s willingness to comply with them.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.08.21256792: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Reicher and Drury propose that the non-adherence to the confinement measures is not due to pandemic fatigue, but rather due to structural weaknesses in our society, such us the inability to effectively self-isolate35. Conversely, other authors have written about the psychological, physical and economic impact of the pandemic on people, which has led to the emergence of the pandemic fatigue in different countries in the world36–41. …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.08.21256792: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Reicher and Drury propose that the non-adherence to the confinement measures is not due to pandemic fatigue, but rather due to structural weaknesses in our society, such us the inability to effectively self-isolate35. Conversely, other authors have written about the psychological, physical and economic impact of the pandemic on people, which has led to the emergence of the pandemic fatigue in different countries in the world36–41. Given that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is expected to last for many more months, new confinements might be needed to control the transmission rate of the disease. However, the population is in a very different mental and economic state than they were at the beginning of the pandemic. Hence, policy makers should be sensitive to this situation in order to maximize the chances that future confinement measures will be both accepted and complied with by the population. 2. Gender and age matter: We identify very significant gender differences in the reported unwillingness to be confined with women being more likely to be unwilling throughout all the phases of the pandemic. According to the OR analysis, age does not seem to play a significant role in increasing the risk to report an unwillingness to be confined. However, our qualitative pattern discovery method identifies several patterns involving individuals (and especially women) of working age with some level psychological and/or economic impact and a clear unwillingness to remain in confinement any longer...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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