COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis Country-Wise: Looking Thru Consumer Choice Theory Lens

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is an infectious disease that was initially detected in December 2019 in Wuhan City, China. Since then, it has been spreading country-wise on mild to severe scales, where Bangladesh, like most countries, was not prepared to meet the challenges. Addressing the issue, most leadership country-wise has chosen the philosophy of traditional approach - Command & Control instead of Modern Approach convincing & making understanding for effective outcome.
Initially, Bangladesh Government began its efforts with evacuations, travel restrictions, social distancing measures, shutting down schools, colleges, universities etc. and finally imposing traditional approaches such as lockdown laws in Dhaka city and slowly beyond.. In early stages, many countries such as Bangladesh did not have adequate discussion or efforts for promoting thru media-outlet on COVID-19 disease prevention, spread & transmissibility, severity and treatment issues. In the 1stwave of COVID-19, like many countries, the Government of Bangladesh
implemented lockdown-law and enforced to have-on-mask and maintain-physical distance.
However, no government effort was seen ensuring modern-approach for convincing people, making people for their way understanding consequences & preventive-measures thus people could take own decision facing the perceived-risk of getting infected of corona-virus. And accordingly, the government’s efforts were very much limited within main cities, despite the fact that over 65 percent of the population lives in rural areas in Bangladesh.

On March 08, 2020, three patients were first identified to be COVID-19 infected where the number of death was zero (IEDCR, 2020) in Bangladesh. The Corona victim death in Bangladesh first took place on March 18 of 2020. Besides government’s efforts for closing many areas & institutions, the government initiated testing and treatment of COVID-19 patients in govt. and in some private
hospitals & clinics across the country. Immediately, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) under Ministry of Health (MoH) ensured its capacity of 50,000 sample-testing per day. Hence, approved testing-centers were inspired and continued the testing process. Since then the number of infected individuals were gradually increasing. However, Government’s this journey began with wrong signal to public where the DGHS was responsible giving approval to service providers conducting COVID- 19 tests. The JKG Healthcare was one of the approved service-providers that were engaged producing fake Covid-19 test-reports and issued forged “Covid-19
Certificate” where high-level officials including Physician Sabrina who was officially employed as Government Surgeon under the DGHS, MoH were engaged With this reality, the general peoples’ questions “whether higher number of people infected” was a creation of Sabrina-ism? While this question was going on, media outs were carefully capturing stories underpinning government’s press-restricted rules & regulations. In the meantime, the author of this book first published an
analytical article entitled: “Way to demolish Sabrina-ism in the Public Sector”, which was published in the Daily Observer, a local Newspaper, on July 15 of 2021. The 21st Century is a world of business-mentality no matter where the human-society resides in the globe. In aim to put forward efforts preventing a repetition of Sabrina-ism in world-economy country-wise, few articles or scientific studies have been completed and published in different academic journals. In addition, few other studies were completed on the topic of “positive-influences of COVID-19 to the progression of digital-banking services” in world-economy country-wise. Scientific techniques including economics-tools particularly Theory of Consumer Choice & Behavior has been used to elaborate the aforementioned facts in aim to assess the consequences including social-cost and social-benefits during this COVID-19 pandemic crisis.