Research pick: Governments need to pay attention to ensure their citizens safety during a pandemic - "Spread of COVID-19 and citizens’ behaviour: a comparison of importance-compliance analyses among Bangladeshis and Malaysians"

A new study in the International Journal of Behavioural and Healthcare Research, looks at how the citizens of two different countries responded to and complied with the rules of the “new normal” that their respective governments enforced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Md. Mahbubar Rahman of the University of Rajshahi in Bangladesh, Rafikul Islam of the International Islamic University Malaysia in Selangor, Malaysia, and Md. Shahed Mahmud of the Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, in Tangail, Bangladesh, explain that nations around the globe responded to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic in very different ways. Their success in controlling the spread of the virus was therefore very different.

How well citizens complied with the rules and regulations also varied considerably from country to country and so too the impact of the virus on each nation and its citizens. The present research looks at the perception of citizens in Bangladesh and Malaysia and their compliance with those rules in their respective nations. Fundamentally, the team found that it must be the job of the government to ensure that their citizens comply fully with the safety rules during a pandemic to prevent the wider spread of the disease and consequent morbidity and mortality associated with infection.

The research focused on the national responses during the first wave of the pandemic following the identification of the disease in late 2019 and its spread through the first half of 2020. The subsequent period when a lot more was known about how the disease spreads, its effects, how it might be treated, and the development of vaccines put the world on a different footing when the second wave of infections arose. Governments and citizens must learn the lessons the pandemic and our response to it have offered us nevertheless. This will be no truer than when another emergent virus appears and brings us a putative new pandemic.

Rahman, M.M., Islam, R. and Mahmud, M.S. (2021) ‘Spread of COVID-19 and citizens’ behaviour: a comparison of importance-compliance analyses among Bangladeshis and Malaysians’, Int. J. Behavioural and Healthcare Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.264–288.