In January 2020, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) firstly spread nationwide in China and affected the lives of billions of people. A state of zero new infections was successfully achieved in China before summer 2020. However, clusters of new cases still popped up in 10 provinces with International Chinese students and businessmen working abroad traveling back to the country from summer to winter 2020. The Chinese government took various measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic in this country of more than 1.3 billion people. In this blog, I want to incorporate ideas of health psychology to explain how the Chinese government manage to contain this novel COVID-19 virus.
During the period when the COVID-19 first hit China, the importance of wearing a mask in preventing the spread of virus is hugely stressed in media health coverage. It was explained by public health officials everywhere, which not only appeared on news coverage on TV, but also on newspaper and online social media. The government would even send official text messages to all citizens reminding people to wear a mask when going out. This is the method of persuasion used in media health coverage, which is the specific kind of social influence in which a particular message or appeal is used to change someone’s beliefs and attitudes as mentioned in the text. The government used persuasion to inform people about the importance of masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19 virus.
Furthermore, the government’s emergency response strategy was to implement nucleic acid testing for all residents when there was a known cluster of new cases popping up in a certain area. In an area with new outbreaks, it was believed that testing of close contacts was insufficient. Instead, the government hoped to find all infected individuals and the only way to do this was to test everyone in the city. This may sound crazy. However, in an authoritarian country like China, the process was actually doable and efficient. The first full-city nucleic acid test was conducted in Wuhan. After successfully treating more than 50,000 patients, Wuhan decided to rule out the hidden coronavirus risk in the city. Starting on May 11, 2021, Wuhan completed the nucleic acid testing of nearly 10 million people over 10 days. Three hundred asymptomatic infections were found. After this, Beijing has also implemented large-scale nucleic acid testing on more than 12 million people with 174 people tested positive for asymptomatic infections. This ruling out for unfound cases by implementing nucleic acid testing is prevention, which reduces the probability of infection with COVID-19 virus.
As a Chinese, I think the best thing about the epidemic prevention work done by the government is to successfully encourage a consistent belief in and make efforts for the epidemic resistance of the whole people, and gradually instill the harm of the epidemic situation and the importance of epidemic prevention into each small group from a small community, so as to promote the people to reach a consensus on the disaster, which is to maximize the efficiency of epidemic resistance, In the process of vaccination, the policy of linkage between provinces and cities has a reward and punishment system, which also completely improves people’s psychological acceptance of the vaccine and the vaccination rate, which is undoubtedly a good example for social psychological science.
Reference
http://www.east.com.cn/ 中国企业互联网思维传递者-东方网景. (n.d.). No.137–english. Retrieved September 23, 2021, from http://www.cpifa.org/en/cms/book/313.