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The reasonably successful ‘Janata Curfew’ on Sunday, 22 March, was undone to some extent when visuals of people dancing, to mark the battle against the novel coronavirus outbreak, went viral.
Now what explains this?
A survey conducted by CVoter and Gallup on 17 and 18 March may provide some answers.
As it turns out, Indians are among the “least worried” people in the world, as far as the novel coronavirus is concerned.
On being asked if they agree or disagree with the statement, “I am afraid that either myself or a member of my family may actually catch coronavirus”, 42 percent respondents in India “strongly disagreed” – that is they strongly denied any possibility that they or their family member could get affected by the virus.
The countries surveyed besides India were: Germany, Italy, United States, Pakistan, United Kingdom, France, Armenia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Netherlands, Palestine, Philippines, Russia, Switzerland, Thailand and Turkey.
The total percentage of respondents who think that COVID-19 won’t affect them, that is combining those who “strongly disagreed” as well as those who “disagreed”, is 60 percent in India, much higher than the worldwide figure of 35 percent.
On the other hand, 39 percent in India “strongly agreed” or “agreed” that coronavirus would affect them, as opposed to the world average of 62 percent.
The survey also reveals that Indians are much more optimistic about what lies ahead, compared to people in many other countries.
Among the 21 countries surveyed, only Kazakhstan (73 percent) and Turkey (63 percent) had a higher proportion of people than India who believe that the worst is over.
The highest proportion of respondents who said that the worst is yet to come was in the UK at 82 percent, followed by Netherlands at 77 percent and France at 70 percent.
On being asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement that, “The coronavirus threat is being exaggerated”, 42 percent respondents in India said they “strongly agree”. This was the highest among all the countries. The world average was just 21 percent.
The percentage of respondents strongly disagreeing was highest in France at 57 percent.
On being asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement that, “I believe the government is handling the coronavirus crisis well”, 58 percent respondents in India said they strongly agreed, 26 percent said that they agreed, 5 percent disagreed and 9 percent strongly disagreed.
Net disagreement was highest in Thailand (76 percent), Ecuador (56 percent) and USA (46 percent), indicating that people in these countries were most dissatisfied with how their government is handling the coronavirus crisis.
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