Is religious behavior harbinger for COVID-19-Indian perspective?

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 is a novel public health problem that started in China, came into limelight in December 2019, and has been declared as a Pandemic by the World health organization (WHO). This pandemic is a challenging problem for most countries as the disease has high infectivity being transmitted from person to person through the respiratory route. COVID-19 pandemic will have both short and long term implications for our society. The study of religious behaviors and religious places should be a topic of interest for controlling an outbreak like COVID-19. By sharing scientific information about COVID-19, religious and faith-based leaders can endorse that information, prevent and reduce fear and stigma about the diseases, and provide reassurance to people in their communities including promoting healthy practices. Religious leaders can under their influence convince the masses by using religious idioms regarding what must be done in dealing with any outbreak from a religious perspective and hence be more effective than civil servants in delivering messages to the community. This outbreak like any highly transmissible disease can extend beyond the control of the respective governments, so it requires all members of society to fight it together. The epidemic poses myriad scientific, technical, and logistic challenges throughout the world and without doubt, we need to marry the worlds of science and religion for sustaining mankind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)