Identification of environmental supply chain bottlenecks:A case study of the Ethiopian Healthcare Supply Chain

The increasing rate of environmental concern and awareness by society has attracted attention from researchers and organisations to consider how to proceed towards green supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to identify operational bottlenecks in the multi-tier supply chain to guide organisations towards where to concentrate their efforts to address their supply chain environmental challenges.acceptedVersion© 2021. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/MEQ-12-2019-027

COVID-19 is viewed as severe as tumor and HIV; perceptions towards COVID-19

Since its first emergence, people have been having different attitudes and perceptions towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Perceptions (e.g. perception of disease threat) have profound consequences on behavior (e.g medication adherence). If adequately available, perception studies guide public awareness efforts or help in understanding behavior. In this study , repeated cross-sectional data were collected from 376 randomly selected globally located respondents over two periods. Participants perceived COVID-19 as severe as Tumor and AIDS (F (2,722) = 2.347; p = .096), and as more severe than other 14 illnesses; e.g. Diabetes and High blood pressure. Age-wise, participants above 50 age group perceived COVID-19 as more severe than the under 50 (F (1,240) = 10.378, p < .001). In addition, the magnitude of severity perception was found to be dependent on the different stages of the outbreak in the respondents' corresponding countries. In a gap of a month time, depression surpassed COVID-19 to be perceived as more severe. Majority of respondents attributed COVID-19 as a physical (vs mental) illness, thus considered it as more severe (vs less severe). Implications of this study could mean; (1) COVID-19 patients might be susceptible to social stigmatization as HIV patients, and (2) severity perception is shaping intervention friendly behaviors

Casual attribution and consumer perseverance on health remedies

Some alternative remedies have been proven to be pharmacologically ineffective and therefore unable to heal any illness and are a burden to publicly funded health insurance. Nevertheless, the market for such remedies is steadily growing and is predicted to reach a global market size of around USD 404 billion by 2028, posing a global health burden. A vast amount of literature has explored why people initiate use of alternative remedies. However, not so much on why maintain use. Counterintuitive to elementary knowledge about consumer behavior, case reports have indicated that some alternative remedy users persevere with a product even when the illness it is intended to treat is not overcome. This seemingly results from causal attribution bias, in which users attribute the cause of non-recovery more to themselves than to the product. In this dissertation, I documented evidence of this counterintuitive form of causal attribution as well as the propensity on the part of consumers to persevere with a failed remedy. Moreover, I explored the predictors of individuals’ susceptibility to such behavior and investigated the consequences with respect to consumption variables relevant to marketing management. The results from empirical investigation confirmed that the tendency for susceptibility to causal attribution bias differs depending on how much a remedy emphasizes mind–body integration and to what extent users of a remedy embrace this ideology. It was documented that alternative users tend to persevere for a longer (vs. a shorter) number of days with alternative (vs. conventional) remedies until they give up and conclude that it does not work even after knowing that the illness was not initially overcome. Moreover, it was shown that alternative remedies are in general less evaluable than conventional remedies. Such a feature of low evaluability caused less attribution of failure to the product and made participants persevere longer with an unsuccessful therapy but also resulted in significantly higher levels of WTP. Furthermore, this effect increased with an increase in an individual’s BPI level, a dispositional belief trait held by every individual to a greater or lesser extent. The research’s findings advance the literature on product loyalty and causal attribution. Managerial wise, the findings help health authorities in their campaign against the proliferation of ineffective health practices by identifying the attribute of the remedy that causes it and/or distinguishing personality of victims that are most susceptible

Temperature and precipitation associate with Covid-19 new daily cases: A correlation study between weather and Covid-19 pandemic in Oslo, Norway

This study aims to analyze the correlation between weather and covid-19 pandemic in the capital city of Norway, Oslo. This study employed a secondary data analysis of covid-19 surveillance data from the Norwegian public health institute and weather data from the Norwegian Meteorological institute. The components of weather include minimum temperature (°C), maximum temperature (°C), temperature average (°C), normal temperature (°C), precipitation level (mm) and wind speed (m/s). Since normality was not fulfilled, a non-parametric correlation test was used for data analysis. Maximum temperature (r = 0.347; p = .005), normal temperature(r = 0.293; p = .019), and precipitation level (r = −0.285; p = .022) were significantly correlated with covid-19 pandemic. The finding might serve as an input to a strategy making in the prevention of covid-19 as the country prepare to enter into a new weather season

Understanding determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy; an emphasis on the role of religious affiliation and individual’s reliance on traditional remedy

Background: The damage COVID-19 has caused interms of mortalities, economic breakdown and social disruption is immense. The COVID-19 vaccine has been one of the efficient prevention strategies so far in preventing the pandemic. However, the publics’ hesitancy towards vaccines has enormously affected this task. With emerging research findings indicating that a substantial proportion of adults are hesitant about a vaccine for COVID-19, important work that identifies and describes vaccine hesitant individuals is required to begin to understand and address this problem. Objective: This study assessed public attitude towards COVID-19 Vaccine and identified important factors that lead to its hesitancy. Methods: A web and paper-based cross-sectional survey study was conducted from July 31 to August 12, 2021. The study participants are staffs and students at Jimma University. A total of 358 participants were selected using stratified simple random sampling and requested to fill a survey questionnaire. Binomial logistic regression analysis was done to identify factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Results:Half of the participants were found to be hesitant to COVID-19 vaccine. The odds of becoming vaccine hesitant among middle income was two times more than those with lower income (AOR 2.17, 95% CI 1.05–4.5). Furthermore, respondent’s extent of exposure was associated with vaccine hesitancy with the odds of becoming vaccine hesitant among those whose source of COVID-19 information is from four media sources (Social Media, Mass Media, Health care worker and Friends/family/Neighbor) being 74% lower (AOR .26, 95% CI .09–.69) than those with one media source. Concern towards vaccine side effect, vaccine effectiveness and having the belief to treat COVID-19 with traditional remedies were found to increase the odds of becoming vaccine hesitant by 31%, 42% and 37% respectively. Moreover, the association between side-effect concern and vaccine hesitancy was moderated by participant’s religious affiliation