Promote to protect: data-driven computational model of peer influence for vaccine perception.

Vaccine hesitancy and acceptance, driven by social influence, is usually explored by most researchers using exhaustive survey-based studies, which investigate public preferences, fundamental values, beliefs, barriers, and drivers through closed or open-ended questionnaires. Commonly used simple statistical tools do not do justice to the richness of this data. Considering the gradual development of vaccine acceptance in a society driven by multiple local/global factors as a compartmental contagion process, we propose a novel methodology where drivers and barriers of these dynamics are detected from survey participants' responses, instead of heuristic arguments. Applying rigorous natural language processing analysis to the survey responses of participants from India, who are from various socio-demographics, education, and perceptions, we identify and categorize the most important factors as well as interactions among people of different perspectives on COVID-19 vaccines. With a goal to achieve improvement in vaccine perception, we also analyze the resultant behavioral transitions through platforms of unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing to derive a compartmental contagion model from the data. Analysis of the model shows that positive peer influence plays a very important role and causes a bifurcation in the system that reflects threshold-sensitive dynamics.

No going back: COVID-19 disease threat perception and male migrants' willingness to return to work in India.

This paper explores the causal link between the likelihood of re-migration to cities and the perceived threat of contracting COVID-19 using novel data on male reverse migrant workers in India. We find that reverse-migrants who believe there is a significant chance of contracting COVID-19 display a significantly lower likelihood of returning to their urban workplaces, regardless of their duration of migration. On the other hand, longer-duration migrants display a lower perceived chance of contracting COVID-19 than shorter-duration migrants. We also contribute to the migration literature by linking behavioural attributes to the decision to migrate. We find that more impatient individuals display a heightened belief regarding contracting COVID-19 and a higher projected likelihood of returning to work. Finally, we find that while both loss and risk-averse individuals have a lower projected likelihood of returning to urban workplaces, only loss-averse individuals perceive that their chance of contracting COVID-19 is lower.

Double Jab: Survey Evidence on Vaccine Hesitancy, Beliefs, and Attitudes in India.

India witnessed a large surge in COVID-19 cases in April 2021, a second wave of nearly 350,000 daily new infections across the country. As of December 2021, cases have reduced drastically, in part due to greater vaccine coverage across the country. This study reports results on vaccine hesitancy, attitudes, and behaviors from an online survey conducted between February and March 2021 in nine Indian cities (N = 518). We find that vaccine hesitancy negatively predicts willingness to take the vaccine, and beliefs about vaccine effectiveness supersede hesitancy in explaining vaccine uptake. Furthermore, we find that mask-wearing and handwashing beliefs, information sources related to COVID-19, and past COVID-19 infection and testing status are all strongly associated with the hypothetical choice of vaccine. We discuss these findings in the context of behavioral theories as well as outline implications for vaccine-related health communication in India.

A Culture-Centered Approach to Experiences of the Coronavirus Pandemic Lockdown Among Internal Migrants in India.

India's coronavirus lockdown forced low-wage migrant workers to return from the city to the home towns and villages from which they came. Pre-pandemic living and working conditions were already stressful and difficult for these migrants. The lockdown became an additional burden, since it shut down sources of income with no assurance about when, or if, work and earning to support families could be resumed. This article draws on the lens of the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) to understand how workers engaged with and navigated these difficult times. A total of 54 migrant workers locked-down at home across the Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal were interviewed for this qualitative study. Financial worries were found to be endemic, with rising debt a major source of stress, and educational qualifications becoming an obstacle to earning. Returning migrants were suspected of bringing the virus from the city, and so stigmatized in their home towns and villages. However, the pandemic lockdown also showed some unexpected healthful consequences. It provided these marginalized, and always busy workers the time and space to stop working for a while, to stay home, eat home food, and take walks in the comparatively green and clean spaces of their home environments. In this, the pandemic lockdown may be seen to have enabled a measure of agency and health in the lives of these workers, an oasis albeit temporary, and ultimately subject to the demands of the globalized cities of India.