Psychological underpinning of panic buying during pandemic (COVID-19)

This letter discusses the psychological underpinning of panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic. Epidemics and pandemics are the impending public health challenges whereby fear and panic are integral human responses historically. Panic behavior during disaster and calamities is an expected response they threaten the ability to cope and destroy the existing equilibrium. Many a time, people develop much-unexplained behavior which differs from country to country, culture to culture. Panic buying / increased buying behavior has been observed during public health emergencies since the ancient period. However, the exact psychological explanation responsible for it has not sought systematically. A perception of scarcity is strongly linked with the panic buying behavior and hoarding behaviors increases if the scarcity develops for the immediate necessaries. It also creates a feeling of insecurity which in turn activates another mechanism to collect things. Fear of scarcity and losing control over the environment, insecurity, social learning, exacerbation of anxiety, the basic primitive response of humans are the core factor responsible for the panic buying phenomenon. Further observational, as well as qualitative studies, are warranted to explore the psychological perspective of panic buying behavior during the crisis moments which in turn would help to find out preventive measures during the future moments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Predicting the antecedents of consumers' intention toward purchase of mutual funds: A hybrid PLS-SEM-neural network approach

The current study intends to identify the behavioural antecedents of investors' attitude and investment intention toward mutual funds using a robust SEM-ANN approach. It focuses on novel factors in the purview of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing digitalization and social media usage. The research outcome indicates that attitude (ATB), awareness (AW) and investment decision involvement (IDI) have a significant positive relation with investment intention (BI). In contrast, perceived barrier (PBR) negatively relates to investment intention. Herd behaviour (HB) and social media influence (SMI) do not influence investment intention toward mutual funds. Moreover, all the tested predictors share direct relation with the attitude toward mutual fund investment, barring perceived risk (PR), which has an inverse relationship. As per the outcome of ANN sensitivity analysis, attitude is the most crucial determinant of investment intention. It is followed by awareness (AW), perceived barriers (PBR) and investment decision involvement (IDI). Among the significant determinants of attitude, self-efficacy (SE) is the most important determinant, followed by perceived usefulness (PU), perceived emergency (PEMER), subjective norms (SN) and perceived risk (PR). © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

ABO blood grouping and COVID-19: a hospital-based study in Eastern India

Background: Blood group has been stated to be one of the risk factors associated with viral diseases like dengue, hepatitis virus, Norwalk virus and even the coronavirus associated with 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. In addition, anti-A antibodies in experimental models have been shown to inhibit the interaction between coronavirus and angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) receptor of the host target cell, the major receptor involved in viral pathogenesis. Thus, several workers propose an association between ABO blood type and coronavirus disease- 2019 (COVID-19) disease in many previous studies. The present study was undertaken in the Eastern part of India in line with these authors to study the association of ABO blood group of patients with COVID susceptibility and severity. Methods: This is a retrospective study over a period of 6 months from June 2020 to November 2020 where patients who underwent quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) test for SARS-COV2 and having a recorded patient blood group type were considered. The qRT-PCR positive admitted cases were considered as cases, and qRT-PCR negative cases were considered as controls. Data were entered in Microsoft Excel format and analyzed by statistical method to obtain association. Results: Consecutively obtained 5000 qRT-PCR positive patients (cases) and 11,700 (controls) were included in the present study. The mean age of cases was higher (54.24 vs. 34. 67) than the controls. Among the cases, the highest number (2379;47.6%) of samples belonged to A blood group followed by B (1278;25.6%) while among the control group O blood group had the highest prevalence (4215;36%). Blood group A had a higher odd of testing positive (Odds ratio-2.552;CI 2.381–2.734;p < 0.0001) than all other blood groups. A blood group is also associated with higher risk of ICU admission (Odds ratio- 1.699;95% CI 1.515–1.905) and 65.3% of this group is also associated with high viral load which gives an indication of higher disease severity. Conclusion: Blood group A is associated with an increased susceptibility to COVID 19 infection than other blood groups. Cases of this blood group are also associated with more critical care needs and a higher viral load on testing.