Covid-19 message at the beginning of phone calls ineffective: Study

The government’s automated Covid-19 message, which kicks in at the start of every phone call, is not the best way to increase public awareness about the disease or even reduce citizens' anxiety, a study has found.

This is especially true with low income groups such as migrant workers who lack stable access to the internet and authoritative sources of information.

A randomised study conducted among a sample group of 914 garment workers from 23 factories in Karnataka between June and August 2020 highlighted the automated recording’s ineffectiveness in generating awareness about the highly contagious disease.

The aim of the researchers from the University of Michigan and Good Business Lab (GBL), a not-for-profit research organisation, was to determine how to combat Covid-19 misinformation among migrant workers.

The average age of the sample group was 24 and about 57 per cent were women. A third of the sample group was educated beyond the 10th grade and three-fourths had smartphones.

Researchers were stunned to discover that a third of participants were unaware that cough was a symptom of the disease, half did not know fever was a symptom and more than half did not know that asymptomatics could spread the disease.

Only 8 per cent were certain that Covid-19 had remedies, 26 per cent said they would recommend symptomatic individuals to take antibiotics while 13 per cent said they would recommend drinking cow’s urine.

A third felt that consuming turmeric regularly protects from Covid-19 infections and 21 per cent said that people of certain religions were more likely to spread the disease.

“While our sample group was garment factory workers, the sample group is emblematic of low income groups in general. What we found was rampant misinformation which was not being addressed by pre-recorded messaging or text messages,” explained Dr Achyuta Adhvaryu of the University of Michigan and co-author of the study.

Pro-active calls needed

For the study, medically-approved information about Covid-19 was shared with three groups of participants through three different media: SMS, recorded voice message, and live phone calls.

“We found that phone calls were more effective in increasing Covid-19 knowledge in participants without smartphones and were responsible for reducing general anxiety by 28 per cent,” Dr Adhvaryu said, adding that the key takeaway was that a human voice delivering a message is more effective than spamming through recordings.

He said that widespread community outreach through live phone calls to convey Covid-19 information is the answer to beating back misinformation.

The study was published in the Journal of Development Economics.