COVID-19 Risk Perceptions After the End of the Public Health Emergency

Abstract

We examine how information provision affects the public’s perceived COVID-19 infection risk after the official end of the pandemic as a public health emergency (PHE). We conducted our survey in Japan in August 2023, a few months after the government reclassified COVID-19 from Category II to Category V and officially ended the PHE. We find that none of the information treatments affected the public’s risk perceptions in a statistically significant way, in stark contrast with a similar information-provision experiment conducted right before the reclassification. Our result suggests that the official end of the PHE may influence how the public responds to news about infection.