COVID-19 Public Health and Social Measures in Southeast Nigeria and Its Implication to Public Health Management and Sustainability

Abstract

Southeast Nigeria witnessed the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health crises. The crises manifest as the conflicts between citizens, policy-makers and leaders over public health policies, creating the circumstance for innovative research. This study examines the public response to the public health and social measures (PHSMs) implemented by the federal government of Nigeria in curtailing the spread of COVID-19, during the height of the pandemic. The focus is to unravel the underlying factors of the public response to the PHSMs, as well as their implications to the overall public health policies and institutions in the region. Guided by the ethnomethodology model, the authors applied qualitative methodology to the research. In-depth interview (IDI) and focused group discussion (FGD) were adopted to gather data from leaders of religious institutions, public and private health institutions, local market institutions, and state security institutions in the 5 states of Southeast Nigeria. The collected data were parsed through thematic analysis and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). The results reveal a range of problems, such as shallow knowledge and misinformation at the local level, gap in public health knowledge and policy, crises of mistrust and misinterpretation of public health objective, citizens-policy-leadership crises, as well as the abuse of PHSMs. These problems were put in perspectives to portray the lessons and the public health policy implications of citizens-policy-leadership crises.