While the covid rears its head, the guard is lowered on the virus both in the attitudes and behaviors of compatriots. On the contrary, the fears of Italians about the economic crisis caused by the pandemic remain high. It is the ‘photograph’ taken by the latest survey of the ‘Continuous Monitor’ elaborated by the EngageMinds Hub, the Research Center in Consumer and Health Psychology of the Catholic University, Cremona Campus, which has been observing and analyzing the attitudes and health and consumption behaviors of Italians. One of the most eloquent figures: as many as 57% of citizens think that the worst is over and only 28% feel at risk of contagion.
The monitoring – conducted on a sample of over 9,000 Italians – estimates, in fact, that less than a third of Italians will get the fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. To be precise, the statistical projection indicates a 27%: it is a figure that emerges by processing the intention to undergo the second booster (the so-called ‘fourth dose’, in fact) among those – 88% of the population – who claim to have received at least one dose of vaccine. And in any case, only 14% of Italians report having already taken the fourth dosereflecting recent reports of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine lying unused in vaccination centres.
“At the basis of the more ‘relaxed’ attitude towards the push to undergo vaccines there is certainly a conspicuous drop in the perception of the risk of contracting Covid-19″, explains Guendalina Graffigna, Full Professor of Psychology at the Catholic University and director of the Center University’s EngageMinds HUB Research Centre.
“Our trending data provide us with the elements for this reading. Suffice it to say that today as many as 57% of Italian citizens think that the worst is over and that only 28% feel at risk of contagion: they were respectively 17% and to 47% in March last year.However, there are differences from a socio-demographic point of view – continues Graffigna – because if, as mentioned, on average 57% of the population now sees the exit from the pandemic tunnel materialising, among only 49% think so of the over 60s; furthermore, this idea makes inroads only in 48% of those with a low educational qualification. Moving on to a territorial perspective, among the residents of the North-West regions the clear majority (63% %) feels safer now”.
As the psychologists of the Research Center of the Catholic University, Cremona campus explain, the attitudes outlined above reverberate in preventive behaviours. In fact, the calculations show that not even a quarter of the population (24%) would undergo a rapid but ‘official’ swab – i.e. administered by a doctor or carried out in a pharmacy – in the presence of fever and only 14% to a molecular swab, more reliable in the results: they are few, but above all a sharp drop from last February’s 24%. And there is another eloquent figure of how much, on the pandemic issue, Italians feel less and less ‘engaged’: from 5% last March, the share of the population who, in the event of a fever, would wait without taking protective measures the disappearance of symptoms.
“However, there is another fact that, in some way, acts as a counterbalance to the alleviation of fears about Covid – underlines Graffigna -. Again from the analyzes of our continuous Monitor, which does not only concern health aspects but is broad spectrum, 45% of citizens believe their family situation has worsened, a figure on the rise given that last February it was 34% who felt in this condition”. This is on a par with a third of people reporting a cessation (8%) or reduction (22%) of their work activity, with an accentuation for those with low incomes.