CURBING COVID-19 PREVALENCE AND OTHER COMMUNICABLE DISEASES: THE LAXITY OF NON-LOCAL-EVIDENCE-BASED AWARENESS CREATION

Designing safety strategies in times of a pandemic such as COVID-19 is the responsibility of all professionals and researchers, designers inclusive. One of the effective ways to curb the prevalence of a communicable disease (CD) is through effective awareness creation (AC) to shape the attitude/behaviour of the target audiences in ways that promote public health safety. Notably, the attitude of a significant number of Nigerians towards the curbing the prevalence of COVID-19 (as at the time of this study) have been most discouraging to law enforcement officers, the government and, most importantly, health workers manning the frontlines in the fight against COVID-19 and other CDs like Laser fever. Therefore, adopting a quantitative approach of the survey type and a sample size of 385 (purposive sampling), this study revealed that the current AC strategies of entities concerned were communicatively effective. However, this effectiveness was not translating into desirable behavioural adjustments suitable for curbing the prevailing CD and protecting public health. This situation was ascribed to the lack of local visual evidences of confirmed case, an omission that turned out to be the key laxity of the adopted AC strategies in the fight against COVID-19 in the study area. The study therefore recommended the use of identity-shielded visual evidences of local laboratory confirmed cases of the prevailing CDs in the production of AC campaign contents.