Growing feeling of safety among the population in Germany
Coronavirus: The feeling of being able to protect oneself from an infection is growing
2021-06-16
(Press-News.org) With increasing vaccination rates and decreasing numbers of infections, the population's feeling of safety is also rising. As the results of the 37th edition of the BfR-Corona-Monitor, a regular survey conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), show, the majority of the population in Germany thinks it can control its risk of an infection well. "62 percent are confident that they can protect themselves from an infection with the coronavirus," says BfR-President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel. "We see that the feeling of safety has increased considerably. At the end of March of this year, only 40 percent of the respondents felt they could protect themselves from an infection."
At the same time, fewer people consider the probability of contracting the coronavirus through proximity to other people to be high. A difference can be seen in the age groups: While 70 percent of those under 40 consider an infection through proximity to others to be likely, only 55 percent of those over 60 do so - possibly because more people in this age group have already been vaccinated.
The greater perceived safety from an infection also seems to have an impact on the population's leisure behaviour. For example, 59 percent of respondents say they have left the house less often in the past two weeks and 71 percent say they have limited personal contacts. At the end of March 2021, when infection rates were starting to increase again, these figures were both 10 percentage points higher.
In addition to increasing contacts and more activities outside the home, it is evident that the population is also less concerned about their social relationships. Since the end of April 2021, the proportion of respondents who are worried about this has fallen from 40 percent to currently 24 percent. Concerns about the economic situation and physical and mental health are also slowly declining among the population.
INFORMATION:
About the BfR-Corona-Monitor
The BfR-Corona-Monitor is a recurring (multi-wave) representative survey on the risk perception of the population in Germany towards the novel coronavirus. Every week between 24 March and 26 May 2020, around 500 randomly selected people were asked by telephone about their assessment of the risk of infection and their protective measures, among other things. Since June 2020, the survey is continued every two weeks with about 1,000 respondents each. A summary of the data is regularly published on the homepage of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. More information about the method and sample can be found in publications about the BfR-Corona-Monitor.
About the BfR
The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) is a scientifically independent institution within the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) in Germany. It advises the German federal government and German federal states ("Laender") on questions of food, chemical and product safety. The BfR conducts its own research on topics that are closely linked to its assessment tasks.
This text version is a translation of the original German text which is the only legally binding version.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-06-16
Chinese researchers have recently discovered links between reduction in microbial stability and soil carbon loss in the active layer of degraded alpine permafrost on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP).
The researchers, headed by Prof. CHEN Shengyun from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and XUE Kai from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted a combined in-depth analysis of soil microbial communities and their co-occurrence networks in the active permafrost layer along an extensive gradient of permafrost degradation.
The QTP encompasses the largest extent of high-altitude mountain ...
2021-06-16
Greater Helsinki -- Transitioning to low-carbon energy production is the biggest climate challenge to overcome. Many countries are already looking to adopt clean heating solutions more widely, with the International Energy Agency projecting that by 2045 nearly half of global heating will be done with heat pumps. To ensure speedy uptake, governments are likely to offer subsidies to ensure these energy-efficient options actually make their way into homes and offices.
A new study from Aalto University assesses the impact of heat pumps on energy consumption as well as how ...
2021-06-16
Research published in the journal ACS Materials and Interfaces has provided new understanding of how false-negative results in Lateral Flow Tests occur and provides opportunity for simple improvements to be made.
Lateral Flow Devices were introduced late in 2020 on a global scale to help detect novel coronavirus infection in individuals, with test results produced rapidly in half an hour or less. However, their potential has been somewhat hindered by inadequate sensitivity, with a high number of false-negative results.
Using X-ray fluorescence imaging from Diamond Light Source, researchers from King's College London ...
2021-06-16
Researchers from the University of Kent's School of Psychology have found that when people are presented with the idea of a Covid-19 "immunity passport", they show less willingness to follow social distancing and face covering guidelines. However, this willingness seems to return when people read more cautious information about Covid-19 immunity.
PhD students Ricky Green and Mikey Biddlestone and Professor Karen Douglas asked participants from the UK and USA to imagine they had either recovered from Covid-19 or were currently infected. Participants asked to imagine ...
2021-06-16
Several different causes of ageing have been discovered, but the question remains whether there are common underlying mechanisms that determine ageing and lifespan. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing research at the University Cologne have now come across folate metabolism in their search for such basic mechanisms. Its regulation underlies many known ageing signalling pathways and leads to longevity. This may provide a new possibility to broadly improve human health during ageing.
In recent decades, ...
2021-06-16
In an international study published by the journal Environment International, the University of Surrey led an international team of air pollution experts in monitoring pollution hotspots in 10 global cities: Dhaka (Bangladesh); São Paulo (Brazil); Guangzhou (China); Medellín (Colombia); Cairo (Egypt); Addis Ababa (Ethiopia); Chennai (India); Sulaymaniyah (Iraq); Blantyre (Malawi); and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania).
Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) set out to investigate whether the amount of fine air pollution particles (PM2.5) drivers inhaled is connected to the duration drivers spend in pollution hotspots and socio-economic indicators such ...
2021-06-16
2 June 2021, Singapore - The human fetal immune system begins to develop early during gestation, however, factors responsible for fetal immune-priming remain elusive. Using multiple complementary approaches, Dr Florent Ginhoux from A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), Professor Jerry Chan from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Professor Salvatore Albani from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Translational Immunology Institute, with collaborators from Cambridge University explored potential exposure to microbial agents in-utero. The team identified live microbes across fetal organs that stimulate activation of fetal T-cells during the second trimester of gestation. Study published in scientific journal, Cell, on 24 June 2021.
The team profiled microbes ...
2021-06-16
Do you like the thick brush strokes and soft color palettes of an impressionist painting such as those by Claude Monet? Or do you prefer the bold colors and abstract shapes of a Rothko? Individual art tastes have a certain mystique to them, but now a new Caltech study shows that a simple computer program can accurately predict which paintings a person will like.
The new study, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, utilized Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to enlist more than 1,500 volunteers to rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and color field. The volunteers' answers were fed into a computer program and then, after this training period, the computer ...
2021-06-16
Chatbots hold promise for dementia patient or caregiver support, but are still in their infancy, finds a paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. None of the interactive digital apps tested by medical researchers and a computer scientist performed well on all testing criteria, and all the apps contained linguistic biases and usability challenges. The authors conclude that until developers produce evidence-based chatbots that have undergone end user evaluation it will be hard to evaluate their potential to adequately educate and support dementia patients and their caregivers.
"Dementia care is complex and no two cases of dementia are alike. Chatbots have the potential of providing ...
2021-06-16
Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but very high in the atmosphere's "ozone layer," it absorbs damaging ultraviolet radiation. Past studies have examined ozone levels in the Southern Hemisphere, but little is known about levels of the molecule in Antarctica over long periods. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have analyzed more than 25 years of Antarctic data, finding that concentrations near the ground arose from both natural and human-related sources.
Ozone gas has a sharp or acrid scent that sometimes accompanies smog or summer storms. It forms when sunlight ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Growing feeling of safety among the population in Germany
Coronavirus: The feeling of being able to protect oneself from an infection is growing
