Perceived risk and compliance at a COVID-19 test station

Public health strategies require members of the public to make informed choices that align with expert evaluations, particularly during a health emergency. It is unclear what motivates people to seek testing during a pandemic. Legitimate reasons would be that they find they have underestimated the risk of pandemic infection, suspected viral exposure, or taken insufficient precautions against infection. We approached people seeking testing at a Norwegian COVID-19 test-station in October 2020 (T1, n = 179) and in January-February 2021 (T2, n = 184), and asked them if they thought of the pandemic as a risk, about exposure to infection sources and whether they had complied with infection control measures. This was compared to responses from a representative sample taken at approximately the same time (T1 n = 2,523 and T2 n = 2,194). We found that people at test-stations viewed the risk as lower, that they had more frequently been exposed to infectious situations, and they had complied less with infection control measures. This supported all three of our preregistered hypotheses. Our results indicate that people seeking COVID-19 testing early in the pandemic in Norway tended to have good reasons to do so. This largely supports the assumption that a well-informed public can make reasonable choices about voluntary testing.