COVID-19
Definition
COVID-19 is a global infectious disease pandemic caused by a coronavirus that spreads rapidly through populations, often via asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic but infectious hosts, and continues to generate substantial morbidity, mortality, and economic costs worldwide. By early 2023, the pandemic had involved an estimated 676 million individual infections and nearly 7 million deaths globally, with hundreds of thousands of new infections and thousands of deaths still occurring in the United States alone within a single month. Successive pandemic waves have been driven by new viral variants, some of which are less virulent than the original strain but more efficient at immune escape and spread, while vaccine uptake has remained uneven and often inadequate across countries and populations. A significant proportion of those ever infected continue to experience long COVID, a persistent condition that may include fatigue, respiratory, cardiac, neurological, and metabolic symptoms. Prevention of infection, through behaviors such as social distancing, face mask use, testing, vaccination, and antiviral treatment, remains the core strategy for pandemic control rather than therapeutic management of disease.
Sources: Fisher & Fisher (2023)
Related Terms
- intervention (1 shared article)
- Information—Motivation—Behavioral Skills Model (1 shared article)
- prevention (1 shared article)
- Next pandemic (1 shared article)
- health behavior change (1 shared article)
Applications
COVID-19 and Pandemic Preventive Behavior
Preventive behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic encompasses social distancing, face mask use, testing, acceptance of vaccination and booster vaccination, self-isolation when infected, and use of antiviral treatments for those at risk of complications. Public health efforts to promote these behaviors have largely been reactive, atheoretical, and fragmented, limiting their effectiveness, a pattern that also characterized early responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The IMB Model of Pandemic Risk and Prevention is proposed as a comprehensive, theory-based framework for understanding the determinants of these behaviors and designing interventions to encourage and sustain them.
Sources: Fisher & Fisher (2023)
COVID-19 and Health Behavior Change Models
Comprehensive, multivariate, theory-based approaches to health behavior change articulated specifically to the COVID-19 context have remained largely absent from widespread public health application, with behavioral science concepts applied mainly in academic research rather than large-scale campaigns. The Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) Model of Pandemic Risk and Prevention addresses this gap by providing a generalizable, empirically testable framework grounded in validated work across multiple health domains. Preliminary correlational and experimental research has offered early support for the model's core constructs in COVID-19 risk and prevention contexts.
Sources: Fisher & Fisher (2023)
