Decisions involving health and economic losses during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

We investigated choices between the sacred values and other quantities. Such decisions may be impossible to avoid during a pandemic. And then we studied perception of the COVID-19 pandemic and psychological mechanism behind such choices. Perception of the pandemic was investigated in the first part of this study in which 330 respondents from Prolific Academic evaluated the negative health consequences of being sick with COVID-19, the related fear and perceived risk. Evaluations were made for both themselves and people of different ages from a general population. Participants also evaluated the effectiveness of the spring lockdown in 2020 and answered questions concerning false beliefs about the pandemic. In the second part of this study we tested to what extent acceptance of economic costs of a lockdown is explained by decisions based on: (1) tradeoffs between health and economic losses; (2) a single criterion - either health or economic losses; and (3) the mechanisms described by Terror Management Health Model. Participants declared acceptance of economic costs of possible lockdown for different levels (ranging from low to high) of three pandemic indices: daily new cases, daily new deaths and the basic reproduction number of infection. Acceptance of economic costs increases when the perceived effectiveness of the earlier lockdown is high, when elderly people are perceived as threatened and when subjects do not hold false beliefs about the pandemic. A majority of respondents (57%) was sensitive to the level of health loss: the higher health losses, the higher economic costs were accepted. These respondents used a compensatory strategy to balance health and economic losses. The others reacted in a way consistent with a single criterion strategy – ca 20% accepted no economic costs and ca 15% accepted any economic costs to fight pandemic, independently of the level of health losses and the way in which they were described.