As the COVID-19 pandemic affects society and people’s lifestyles, the way people engage in international exchanges might change and disease prevention measures could become the new normal, an academic said on Saturday.
When facing a disaster, such as an earthquake, people tend to adopt a mental state called “normalcy bias” and expect things to continue the way they have in the past, according to their experience, said Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元), an associate professor of urban planning and disaster management at Ming Chuan University.
While this way of thinking generally works for most situations, people have a propensity to use their experience to try to understand even inapplicable future events, including unprecedented disasters, he said.
People might at first believe that “everything is going to be alright, because it always has been,” and take much more time to recognize that the current disaster is an exception from the norm, Ma said.
At the early stages of the pandemic, most people in European countries and the US reacted with an attitude of: “We would not be so unlucky that we will fall victim to it,” or “It is nothing serious,” and continued to attend crowded events, which is an example of normalcy bias, he said.
Japan was also caught off-guard in the pandemic’s early stages, Ma said.
Although Japan has a well-thought-out disease prevention plan drafted by the central government and local communities, and has provided training for disease prevention personnel involved in the plan, people who were not involved in it had limited understanding of disease prevention measures, he said.
Japanese generally exhibit low levels of political participation, with about 30 percent of the population still unaware of the disease situation, he added.
The approach taken by Taiwan to fight COVID-19 was one that “adjusted along the way,” so although its advance planning was not as comprehensive as Japan’s, Taiwan quickly found solutions to solve the problems it encountered, Ma said.
Integration and coordination between government agencies, as well as civil society’s attention and cooperation, are key to the nation’s successful performance in disease prevention, he added.
His conservative estimate is that the pandemic might continue until spring next year, with another peak in winter, so although there had been no local infections in Taiwan for six consecutive days last week, Taiwanese should not let their guard down, Ma said.
The world will enter the “post-COVID-19 era” when European countries and the US return to work and resume economic and social activities, while border controls and airline regulations could be tightened, such as stricter examinations before boarding a flight, providing limited in-flight services and stricter screening measures on arrival, he said.
People should understand that independent or group travel would not resume soon, and overseas travel would become more complicated, he added.
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