ABSTRACT
In the context of frequent occurrences of disasters worldwide, disaster-coping capability is imperative for risk reduction and contemporary emergency management. The global COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 has further highlighted the significance of resilience construction at different geographical scales. Overall, the conceptual cognition of resilience in disaster management covers multiple elements and has diverse yielding on regional assessment. This study assesses the local resilience to the public health disaster at the prefecture-level cities, focusing on two dimensions consisting of vulnerability and capability in the targeted provincial region of Jiangsu in China. To this end, based on the vulnerability-capability framework, the Rough Analytic Hierarchy Process (RAHP) method was applied to the resilience assessment. Drawing upon the criteria derived from literature, the criteria weights were determined with the RAHP method and we assessed urban resilience with census data. In addition, the hierarchical factors contributing to urban resilience were determined using robustness analysis. This research provides constructive ideas for regional disaster reduction and contributes to the government's capability to improve urban resilience. © 2022
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 should not be the world's last public health disaster, so there is an urgent need to learn from COVID-19 to prepare better for the next public health disaster. This study aims to understand the factors that make people wear a face mask at the beginning of an outbreak of public health disaster. Semi-structured interviews were conducted during April 2020 in China, one month after the COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. The respondents were members of the public living in China, covering two age groups: young adults and older adults. They were recruited using a convenient sample and snowball sampling strategy. The results were analysed using content analysis. Seventeen subjects were recruited, among which nine were young adults (average age = 26.4; SD = 10.5), and eight were older adults (average age = 60.4; SD = 12.1). This study found that environmental factors, personal factors, factors concerning wearing masks, specific circumstances, and development of the pandemic were the common factors considered by both young adults and older adults. This study should help the authority formulate prevention policies better to reduce the risk of an outbreak if there is a new virus outbreak in the future, unfortunately.