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COVID‐19 pandemic has affected over 100 countries in a matter of weeks. People's response toward social distancing in the emerging pandemic is uncertain. In this study, we evaluated the influence of information (formal and informal) sources on situational awareness of the public for adopting health‐protective behaviors such as social distancing. For this purpose, a questionnaire‐based survey was conducted. The hypothesis proposed suggests that adoption of social distancing practices is an outcome of situational awareness which is achieved by the information sources. Results suggest that information sources, formal (P = .001) and informal (P = 0.007) were found to be significantly related to perceived understanding. Findings also indicate that social distancing is significantly influenced by situational awareness, P = .000. It can, therefore, be concluded that an increase in situational awareness in times of public health crisis using formal information sources can significantly increase the adoption of protective health behavior and in turn contain the spread of infectious diseases., Highlights Reducing mortality caused by COVID‐19 can be achieved by awareness.Situation awareness can be increased by formal information sources.Increased situational awareness lead to adoption of health protective behavior.

Forecasting disease outbreaks in real-time using time-series data can help for the planning of public health interventions. We used a support vector machine (SVM) model using epidemiological data provided by Johns Hopkins University Centre for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE), World Health Organization (WHO), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to predict upcoming records before the WHO made an official declaration. Our study, conducted on the time series data available from 22 January till 10 March 2020, revealed that COVID-19 was spreading at an alarming rate and progressing towards a pandemic. The initial insight that confirmed COVID-19 cases were increasing was because these received the highest number of effects for our selected dataset from 22 January to 10 March 2020, i.e., 126,344 (64%). The recovered cases were 68289 (34%), and the death rate was around 2%. Moreover, we classified the tweets from 22 January to 15 April 2020 into positive and negative sentiments to identify the emotions (stress or relaxed) posted by Twitter users related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis identified that tweets mostly conveyed a negative sentiment with a high frequency of words for #coronavirus and #lockdown amid COVID-19. However, these anxiety tweets are an alarm for healthcare authorities to devise plans accordingly.

Travel and tourism have been hard-hit by COVID-19, and people have been forced to cancel travel plans due to governments being forced to implement travel bans to curb infection dissemination. Therefore, this study investigates the influence of situational awareness for adopting health-protective behaviours such as postponed travel plans. We used the theory of situational awareness (SAT) coupled with the health belief model (HBM) to analyze health-related behaviors. Data from a cross-sectional survey of 705 Pakistani and international adults were analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling, during the peak of the COVID-19. The results confirmed that perceived understanding of COVID-19 cause influences perceived severity, understanding of contracting COVID-19 influences perceived susceptibility, and perceived understanding of COVID-19 prevention influences both perceived barriers and perceived benefits. The results further showed that perceived understanding of COVID-19 prevention is a strong predictor of self-efficacy, which ultimately influences health-protective behaviour. In addition, the sentiment analysis revealed that as COVID-19 continues to rise, people are becoming more sentimental and avoiding travel, even during festivals. The outcome of this study demonstrates that situational awareness has an effect on the postulates of health-protective measures and plays a key role in the implementation of protective measures such as canceling travel plans to ensure protection.

This work investigates the use of distance learning in saving students' academic year amid COVID-19 lockdown. It assesses the adoption of distance learning using various online application tools that have gained widespread attention during the coronavirus infectious disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Distance learning thrives as a legitimate alternative to classroom instructions, as major cities around the globe are locked down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To save the academic year, educational institutions have reacted to the situation impulsively and adopted distance learning platforms using online resources. This study surveyed random undergraduate students to identify the impact of trust in formal and informal information sources, awareness and the readiness to adopt distance learning. In this study, we have hypothesized that adopting distance learning is an outcome of situational awareness and readiness, which is achieved by the trust in the information sources related to distance learning. The findings indicate that trust in information sources such as institute and media information or interpersonal communication related to distance learning programs is correlated with awareness (β = 0.423, t = 12.296, p = 0.000) and contribute to readiness (β = 0.593, t = 28.762, p = 0.001). The structural model path coefficient indicates that readiness strongly influences the adoption of distance learning (β = 0.660, t = 12.798, p = 0.000) amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Our proposed model recorded a predictive relevance (Q2) of 0.377 for awareness, 0.559 for readiness, and 0.309 for the adoption of distance learning, which explains how well the model and its parameter estimates reconstruct the values. This study concludes with implications for further research in this area.

Background Educational institutes around the globe are facing challenges of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Online learning is being carried out to avoid face to face contact in emergency scenarios such as coronavirus infectious disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Students need to adapt to new roles of learning through information technology to succeed in academics amid COVID-19. Objective However, access and use of online learning resources and its link with satisfaction of students amid COVID-19 are critical to explore. Therefore, in this paper, we aimed to assess and compare the access & use of online learning of Bruneians and Pakistanis amid enforced lockdown using a five-items satisfaction scale underlying existing literature. Method For this, a cross-sectional study was done in the first half of June 2020 after the pandemic situation among 320 students’ across Pakistan and Brunei with a pre-defined questionnaire. Data were analyzed with statistical software package for social sciences (SPSS) 2.0. Results The finding showed that there is a relationship between students’ satisfaction and access & use of online learning. Outcomes of the survey suggest that Bruneian are more satisfied (50%) with the use of online learning amid lockdown as compared to Pakistanis (35.9%). Living in the Urban area as compared to a rural area is also a major factor contributing to satisfaction with the access and use of online learning for both Bruneian and Pakistanis. Moreover, previous experience with the use of online learning is observed prevalent among Bruneians (P = .000), while among friends and family is using online learning (P = .000) were encouraging factors contributed to satisfaction with the use of online learning among Pakistanis amid COVID-19. Correlation results suggest that access and use factors of online learning amid COVID-19 were positively associated with satisfaction among both populations amid COVID-19 pandemic. However, Bruneian is more satisfied with internet access (r = 0.437, P Conclusion The study suggested that it is crucial for the government and other policymakers worldwide to address access and use of online learning resources of their populace amid pandemic.