Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

How education and GDP drive the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

BACKGROUND: Since vaccination is the decisive factor for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to understand the process of vaccination success which is not well understood on a global level. The study is the first to judge the now completed "first wave" of the vaccination efforts. The analysis is very relevant for the understanding why and where the vaccination process observed got stuck by the end of 2021. METHODS: Using data from 118 countries globally and weighted least squared and survival analysis, we identify a variety of factors playing crucial roles, including the availability of vaccines, pandemic pressures, economic strength measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), educational development, and political regimes. RESULTS: Examining the speed of vaccinations across countries until the Fall of 2021 when the global process got stuck, we find that initially authoritarian countries are slow in the vaccination process, while education is most relevant for scaling up the campaign, and the economic strength of the economies drives them to higher vaccination rates. In comparison to North and Middle America, European and Asian countries vaccinated initially fast for 5% and 10% vaccination rate thresholds, but became rather slow reaching the 30% vaccination level and above. The findings are robust to various applied estimation methods and model specifications. CONCLUSIONS: Democratic countries are much faster than authoritarian countries in their vaccination campaigns when controlling for other factors. This finding suggests that the quality of government and the political environment play a key role in popular support for government policies and programs. However, despite the early success of their vaccination campaigns, the democratic country group has been confronted with strong concerns of vaccine reluctance among their vast populations, indicating the two most potent variables explaining the speed of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign are education and economic conditions.

The race Against Time to Save Human Lives During the COVID-19 With Vaccines: Global Evidence.

Voluminous vaccine campaigns have been used globally, since the COVID-19 pandemic has brought devastating mortality and destructively unprecedented consequences to different aspects of economies. This study aimed to identify how the numbers of new deaths and new cases per million changed after half of the population had been vaccinated. This paper used actual pandemic consequence variables (death and infected rates) together with vaccination uptake rates from 127 countries to shed new light on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. The 50% uptake rate was chosen as the threshold to estimate the real benefits of vaccination campaigns for reducing COVID-19 infection and death cases using the difference-in-differences (DiD) imputation estimator. In addition, a number of control variables, such as government interventions and people's mobility patterns during the pandemic, were also included in the study. The number of new deaths per million significantly decreased after half of the population was vaccinated, but the number of new cases did not change significantly. We found that the effects were more pronounced in Europe and North America than in other continents. Our results remain robust after using other proxies and testing the sensitivity of the vaccinated proportion. We show the causal evidence of significantly lower death rates in countries where half of the population is vaccinated globally. This paper expresses the importance of vaccine campaigns in saving human lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its results can be used to communicate the benefits of vaccines and to fight vaccine hesitancy.