At the start of the pandemic, young people saw COVID-19 as a threat to the older generation, but not to themselves

During the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, young Singaporeans understood the infectious disease to be risky for their parents and older relatives, but not themselves, an NTU Singapore study has found.

Young Singaporeans were more concerned about the dangers of fake news surrounding COVID-19 rather than the health threat posed by the disease and believed misinformation about the pandemic affected the older generation more than them.

The study led by NTU Singapore’s Associate Professor Edson Tandoc Jr and researcher James Lee Chong Boi involved eight focus group discussions with 89 participants aged 21 to 27.

The discussions were held in early February, two months after the first COVID-19 case in the world was confirmed in China last year. Singapore saw its first case in January. By the time the last focus group discussion was conducted, the number of confirmed cases had risen from 24 to 74.

Through the focus groups, the two authors found that rather than actively seeking information about COVID-19, many young adults got their news about the virus from social media platforms and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.

This shaped their view that the virus was risky for older generations but not for themselves, which in turn shaped their behavioural response to the outbreak, such as not wearing face masks, which was not mandated in the early stages of the outbreak.

Assoc Prof Tandoc, who led the study, said studying initial public reaction towards a health crisis like the pandemic could guide practitioners and social policy makers on how to handle the outbreak in the long term. “An important consideration from these findings is how to make young people who think they are not prone to COVID-19 to be still engaging in proactive behaviours against the virus. This is even more important during the initial phase of the pandemic, where credible information about the new virus was scarce,” he added.