Community responses during the early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong: risk perception, information exposure and preventive measures

Kin On Kwok; Kin Kit Li; Ho Hin Chan; Yuan Yuan Yi; Arthur Tang; Wan In Wei; Yeung Shan Wong

On 12 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus which 54 caused unknown pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China since December 2019 as "2019-55 nCoV", which was renamed by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses as "SARS-CoV-2" 56 on 11 February 2020. In parallel, the WHO formally named the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 as 57 "COVID-19", short for Coronavirus Disease 2019. Back in late December 2019, a cluster of 27 58 pneumonia cases associated with SARS-CoV-2 with a common link to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale 59 Market were reported [1] , and the first death case attributable to SARS-CoV-2 occurred on 9 January 60 2020. Soon after the first global incidence was confirmed in Thailand on 12 January 2020, new cases 61 were reported in different countries and were mostly associated with Wuhan travel history or residency. To control this COVID-19 epidemic, much effort has been paid to identifying the etiological agent, 77 epidemiological parameters such as incubation period [4] , disease transmissibility [4, 5] , clinical 78 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.