The Psychological Ability to Cope Reduced Infections During the Pandemic: A Two-Year Population-Based Study of The Determinants of 123 Million COVID-19 Test Results in Denmark (preprint)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a key concern for authorities was to identify and activate the psychological states most likely to motivate the public to engage in protective behavior such as physical distancing and hygienic protection. While feelings of fear and threat were rampant during the pandemic, theories of health psychology have highlighted appraisals related to the ability to cope (e.g., the feeling of being able to cost-effectively adhere to government advice) and argued that coping appraisals are superior predictors of motivations to protect the self against risks. In this study, we provide a massive population-based comparison of the association between, on the one hand, threat appraisals, and coping appraisals and, on the other hand, protection against actual infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we utilize a unique data infrastructure from Denmark that couple surveys of 8 % of the adult Danish population (N= 386.633) with the individual results of all 123 million COVID-19 tests performed in Denmark during 23 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, controlling for a comprehensive range of sociodemographic measures and employing panel data to bolster internal validity, we observe that stronger coping appraisals are consistently associated with lower individual probability of COVID-19 infection risk. We find no con-sistent evidence for a similar association for threat appraisals. Threat appraisals rather seem to index – to some extent, accurately – individual feelings of infection exposure. As appeals to fear also have unintended negative consequences (includ-ing anxiety, fatigue, and stigmatization), the findings provide strong empirical support for relying on coping-oriented public health communication in future societal crises in the domain of health and beyond.

Social Compliance During High Stringency Periods Efficiently Reduces COVID-19 Incidence: Evidence from Google Mobility Reports (preprint)

It is crucial to understand and learn as much as possible from the current global Sars-CoV-2 pandemic for the sake of future precautions. Apart from strong government restrictions such as complete lockdowns, curfews, and mask mandates, other factors influence viral transmission. Since June 2020, Denmark has had an extensive test and surveillance program and made data publicly available at the municipality level. Here we use these data and integrate publicly available data on government restrictions, weather data, and mobility data to model COVID-19 incidence in 98 Danish municipalities from September 2020 to February 2021. The inclusion of municipality heterogeneity, weather and mobility data increases the amount of variance explained by ~29% compared to a simpler model taking only incidence and restrictions into account. We found a strong and significant effect from temperature which interacts with government restrictions. Our results indicate that higher temperatures limit viral transmission when government restrictions are low, but that the temperature effect diminishes under stronger restrictions. This is most likely due to a change in human behavior rather than a biological effect. Likewise, we found that changes in residential mobility were significant factors that also interacted with restrictions. When restrictions were strong, we found that increased residential mobility resulted in decreased COVID-19 incidence, suggesting residential mobility as a proxy for compliance. Our results show the increased explanatory power of integrating different variables when modeling COVID-19 incidence. The weather seems to predict human behavior in a quite predictable way and mobility data could be used to measure current compliance with government restrictions.