COVID-19 related policies: The role of environmental concern in understanding citizens' preferences

The Intention of Retail Stores in Taiwan to Cooperate with the Government in the Establishment of IT Measures for Pandemic Prevention

This study focuses on the cooperative attitude and intention of retail stores in Taiwan to cooperate with the government's related pandemic prevention measures. The study is based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The study includes factors such as perceived risk of infection, job stress, pandemic prevention IT (information technology) convenience, pandemic prevention attitude, and pandemic prevention intention. Pandemic prevention attitude is used as a mediating variable to establish the research framework. This study collected research data through a questionnaire survey. A total of 457 valid questionnaires were collected through an electronic questionnaire platform. The findings showed that perceived risk of infection and pandemic prevention IT convenience had a positive and significant effect on pandemic prevention attitude (β = 0.567; β = 0.422) and pandemic prevention intention (β = 0.424; β = 0.296). Job stress has a significant negative effect on attitude (β = -0.173). In addition, job stress influenced intention through attitudes. Finally, perceived risk, job stress, and IT convenience had high explanatory power (R² = 0.706) on attitudes. Perceived risk, IT convenience, and attitude also had moderate explanatory power (R² = 0.588) on prevention intention. The study also suggests practical recommendations to improve and cooperate with pandemic prevention intention.

The environment, epidemics, and human health

In this editorial piece, the Editors of the Virtual Special Issue (VSI) "The environment, epidemics, and human health" comment on the papers accepted for publication, which were selected after peer-reviewing among all those manuscripts submitted to the Special Issue. In view of the title of the VSI, it is clear that its aim goes beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to explore relations among environmental aspects, any kind of epidemics, and human health. However, COVID-19 is still hitting as a global and current main issue, causing that manuscripts dealing with this disease and the SARS-CoV-2 virus are of high relevance in the whole set of research papers published.

Quality of Chinese government environmental health information disclosure during COVID-19 pandemic: Satisfaction survey on University students

Government played a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic by disclosing related environmental health information to the public. A satisfaction survey is often used to evaluate the public's satisfaction of the government's information disclosure while reflecting problems in the current disclosure system. As University students generally have better cognitive skills, they efficiently received related information during the pandemic, and therefore 717 questionnaires completed by University students were selected for this study. During the pandemic, the quality of the government's environmental health information disclosure system ranked at 13.89, marginally higher than average. Moreover, the timeliness and content adequacy of the disclosure system ranked at a level slightly above average. By adopting Hayes PROCESS Model 4 and 8, this study found that there is a direct impact of environmental health knowledge and environmental health awareness on satisfaction. Furthermore, University students' environmental health knowledge and awareness enhanced satisfaction through the mediating effect of self-reported environmental behavior. Finally, this study attempted to discover the conditions under which environmental health knowledge and awareness would have a greater direct and indirect influence on satisfaction, that is, the reverse moderating effect of household income level. In addition, this paper offers policy recommendations to enhance quality of government environmental health information disclosure system.