DO WELL-BEING FACTORS INFLUENCE THE PRACTICE OF SOCIAL ISOLATION FROM COVID-19?

Responsible researcher: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo

Source: https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/40532

Intervention Location: Brazil

Sample Size: 17.254

Sector: Healthcare

Variable of Main Interest: Isolation

Type of Intervention: Social Isolation

Methodology: Others

Summary

The Covid-19 pandemic requires the adoption of isolation measures to contain the spread of the virus. However, in a country like Brazil, with precarious housing, such a measure may be a limiting factor for its application. This article studies which elements of well-being influence the practice of social isolation by Brazilian individuals. The results suggest the presence of green or open areas and knowledge about the disease increases the individual's likelihood of practicing social isolation. However, the authors emphasize that the respondents to the form come from a spectrum of the population with above-average income and education.

1. Policy Problem

Until the emergence of vaccines for the coronavirus, social distancing was the available tool to mitigate the spread of the virus (Flaxman et al., 2020). Thus, within this context, several aspects influence the adoption of isolation measures, such as education, income, stress levels, misinformation and even political aspects (Bezerra et al., 2020; Machado et al., 2020; Ajzenman, Cavalcanti and Mata, 2020). In Brazil, housing conditions are precarious, which appears to be a limitation to home isolation measures. Thus, worsening the psychological effects that arise from the need for confinement (Pires, 2020; Brooks et al., 2020).

Therefore, the objective of the article was to test the hypothesis of which elements of well-being influence the behavior of individuals during the social isolation that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

2. Implementation and Evaluation Context

As will be explained below, the study was prepared using an online form, thus, it has an opinion research format in which it was not necessary to request identification of the responding individuals or evaluation by the Ethics Committee. Furthermore, the authors emphasize that, as a result, it is not possible to make extrapolations beyond the data collected from the Brazilian population.

3. Policy/Program Details

To carry out the research, the authors created an online form on the Google platform, which received 17,254 responses from all Brazilian states. As a dependent variable, the authors used the answers given by individuals to the question about the adoption of the isolation level, as follows:

• 1 = I do not practice isolation;
• 2 = I practice isolation partially;
• 3 = I practice total isolation.

The control variables are: green or open area, physical activity, variation in sleeping hours, elderly individuals, gender and whether it is believed that isolation reduces the number of victims. Apart from the sleep variable, which has three response options (sleep less hours, sleep more hours and there was no change in sleep hours), the other variables are all binary variables.

The majority of respondents are women with an income range between 2 and 5 minimum wages (31.16%). Of those who responded, around half had postgraduate degrees, while 9.32% only had primary education. Regarding the level of isolation, the responses varied in: 11.2% are not performing isolation, 57.2% are performing partial isolation and 31.4% are practicing total isolation. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that 56% of elderly people are practicing total isolation.

4. Method

A multinominal logistic regression was used to estimate the marginal effects since this model allows the use of dependent variables that assume more than two categories, which is the case of this dependent variable, as explained previously. With this model, the probability that an individual is in a certain category “ j ” is obtained.

• Main Results

The results demonstrate that the “elderly” variable has a greater magnitude in increasing the probability of the individual being in total isolation, which is justified as a prior consequence of there being a greater risk of death in elderly people who contract the coronavirus. The estimates also suggest that men are less likely to be isolated and that the fact that a person believes that social isolation helps to reduce the number of victims of Covid-19 increases the probability of the individual practicing violence by 0.15 percentage points. total isolation. This belief may be related to fear for your own health, as well as fear of infecting other people. In which social isolation decisions therefore have cost and benefit assessments from the individual and societal point of view (Brooks et al., 2020; Bavel et al., 2020).

In relation to the green area, the results demonstrate that the presence of this space in your home represents an increase in the likelihood of the individual practicing total isolation. And those individuals who practice physical activity were also more likely to be completely isolated. Individuals who have slept more hours were 0.017 percentage points more likely to practice total isolation compared to those who had no variation in the number of hours and sleep.  

      The green area variable corroborates the relationship between housing quality and well-being, in which the characteristics of the living space (temperatures, water and air quality, cleanliness, for example) influence well-being during social isolation. Thus, the results suggest that access to green or open areas in homes can alleviate the discomforts of social isolation.

6. Public Policy Lessons

The results suggest that variables related to well-being and knowledge about the risks of Covid-19 influence the practice of social isolation. However, the authors emphasize that these data refer to a part of the population with higher income and education levels than the national average, which, therefore, suggests the need for a complementary analysis for different population groups. However, it is the first sign that it is necessary to take into account household well-being factors when developing strategies to face the pandemic.  

Reference

Influence of home well-being conditions on the practice of social isolation during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Journal of Health & Biological Sciences, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 1-7, 2020.