According to the white paper, the overall effectiveness of the lockdown decision across cities was at 91%, with five of the sixteen cities giving it above 98% or ‘excellent’ score. However, the overall implementation of the same across cities was much lower, at 74%.

Speaking about the findings in the white paper, N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research, said, “The lockdown decision and implementation had a significant gap of 24% in terms of effectiveness. There are also big gaps in information and knowledge about the Coranavirus transmission, especially in two age brackets, 21 to 24 years and 46 to 50 years. The same information gap is seen across cities, barring Mumbai. The misinformation is impacting the attitudes and actions of citizens, for example the belief that eating meat or eggs would.”

“Consumers’ trust on India’s health ability to combat crisis is considerably high, at 73%, which translates as ‘good’, while their trust on India’s economic ability to combat crisis is significantly lower at 63%, showing that the fears of a long term financial and economic impact are prominent on the minds of the citizens,” added Chandramouli.

On coping with the crisis, children were affected and data showed that this was not getting recognised and addressed by the family as the coping indices were significantly different for both.

“Perhaps parents take the tantrums and confusion children face during lockdown as they would in normal times, often not addressing it directly. This is clearly indicated in the wide gap between the coping scores of children and the family. It is most important that parents take cognisance of the fact that children are going through extremely trauma during the lockdown, and need to take the time and effort to explain and guide their children through with empathy and love.”

In the Family Worry Index, the highest concern across cities was that the family may contract the disease (74%), job/ business loss was the second biggest concern (68%), and delayed salary was third (62%). Lucknow displayed the highest Family Worry Index at 85%, followed by Nagpur at 81%. The survey found that the Economic Impact Worry Index was at 66%, showing that the personal worries overshadowed any other worry of the citizens.

While most cities are relatively aware about the disease symptoms, they are considerably ill informed about the disease spread. Misinformation is highest about disease spread in Delhi followed by Chandigarh. Delhi, however, scored the highest in terms of the knowledge on symptoms, followed by Mumbai which was nearly two-third lower in this quotient.

TRA Research, a Comniscient Group company, is a consumer insights and brand intelligence company dedicated to understanding and analysing stakeholder behaviour through two globally acclaimed proprietary matrices of Brand Trust and Brand Desire.