Original Research Article
Year: 2021 | Month: July-September | Volume: 6 | Issue: 3 | Pages: 345-349
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijshr.20210759
Correlation between Perceived Fear of Covid-19 Infection and Demand for Covid-19 Vaccination in Thailand, a Cross Sectional Study
Sompoom Sunpaweravong
Triam Udom Suksa School, Bangkok, Thailand.
ABSTRACT
As the global COVID-19 pandemic became increasingly severe, the perceived fear of infection amongst the general population increased significantly. Many aspects of COVID-19 infection such as the ailment’s severe symptoms and risk of death contributed greatly to the collective fear surrounding this disease. The fear of infection resulted in lifestyle changes for many which in turn caused a great extent of socioeconomic impacts on both the regional and global level. Correlating closely to the fear of infection, vaccine related fear became a growing trend amongst the public. The majority of those fearing the vaccines were skeptical of its safety and risk of severe although rare side effects such as blood clots or convulsion not to mention the more common side effects such as high fevers that deterred a significant portion of the population from getting vaccinated. With these two closely related fears causing great effects on our society, our study decided to study the correlation and interaction between these two metrics. Through measuring both COVID-19 infection and vaccination fear of 351 subjects from diverse demographics, our study found many correlations between the perceived fear for COVID 19 infection, demand and reluctance for COVID 19 vaccination and other factors such as the age of the subject. Our study also took various measurements regarding the subjects involved in this study such as the subject’s age and underlying diseases that are known to augment the severity of COVID-19 symptoms such as Diabetes, underlying heart disease and lung diseases. After rigorous data analysis, the study found proportionate correlations between the levels of perceived fear of COVID-19 infection and the demand for vaccination. The demographics of participants (age and underlying diseases) were also found to have a correlative effect on the former measurements.
Keywords: COVID-19 fear, vaccine hesitancy, COVID-19 risk factors.