March 1, 2021

As part of the Ask NUS Economists series in The Straits Times, Professor Lorenz Goette and Mr Chen Zihua (NUS Department of Economics) write about the link between being resistant to installing digital contacting tracing (DCT) applications and being vaccinated, as well as possible factors that contribute to both.

Through an experiment conducted on a sample of participants in Germany, they found that simply encouraging people to download a DCT application, such as by showing them an advertising clip, was not motivational enough for them to download the application. Rather, the push to install these applications increased when more information about the pandemic was provided, such as the COVID-19 incidence rates in the participant’s county. They concluded that information provision (specifically, spotlighting the local incidence rates) was key to encouraging the uptake of individuals with regard to subscribing to the local DCT application. More troubling, however, was the discovery that uptake of the DCT application was lowest in counties with the highest incidence rates thus far. What further compounds the problem is that groups of individuals in these countries also have the most social contacts, further increasing their risk of contracting the virus.

These results are disturbing as they foreshadow potential issues in people being willing to get vaccinated as well, since Prof Goette and Mr Chen also found a correlation between people unwilling to install the application and unwilling to get vaccinated. They suggest that greater government intervention would probably be needed in getting more people to participate in contact tracing efforts and receive vaccines, such as a mandate that people would first need to be vaccinated before being allowed to fly.

Read the article here.