Public Exposure to Live Animals, Behavioural Change, and Support in Containment Measures in response to COVID-19 Outbreak: a population-based cross sectional survey in China

Zhiyuan Hou; Leesa Lin; Liang Lu; Fanxing Du; Mengcen Qian; Yuxia Liang; Juanjuan Zhang; Hongjie Yu

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.21.20026146 doi: medRxiv preprint live animals includes the following behaviours: visiting the live poultry or wild animal markets, buying live poultry or wild animals (i.e., frequency of purchases, practice of picking up live animals before purchasing, location where the purchased animals were slaughtered), eating wild animal products, raising pets, and touching stray animals. To measure behavioural change during the outbreak, each respondent was asked to report exposing behaviours both (1) prior to the outbreak: before Dec 31, 2019 when COVID-19 cases were first released by Wuhan Health Commission and (2) since the outbreak, between Jan 1 to Feb 10, 2020. For live animal consumption habits, where behaviour change cannot be measured in a short period of time, we assessed people's intention to: 1) buy live poultry or wild animals, and eat wild animal products (continue to buy/eat as usual, buy/eat less, not buy/eat any more) and 2) continue raising pets and touching stray animals (continue to raise/touch as usual, temporarily not during the outbreak, try or resolutely not even after the outbreak).