Global Summit on COVID-19
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Accepted Abstracts

Necessity of Political Trust in COVID-19

Ahmad Kalateh Sadati*
Department of Sociology, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran 

Citation: Sadati AK (2021) Necessity of Political Trust in COVID-19. SciTech Central COVID-19. 

Received: June 15, 2021         Accepted: June 17, 2021         Published: June 17, 2021

Abstract

Trust between the government and the people was and is a very important issue in the COVID 19 pandemic. Political trust is especially important in developing countries. Most of the effects of trust are related to the decisions of the governments in the epidemic and also the citizens' support with these decisions. Trusts make governments stronger in their decisions because they are not concerned with public persuasion. Although trust is related to the quality of the relationship between the government and the people in the past, it is also related to the way in which government activities are analyzed in a pandemic. Trust between people allows people to follow decisions on issues such as social distancing, home quarantine, lockdown, and related issues which prevent the spread of pandemics. Lack of trust can expose the government to incompetence. In this case, many government activities are neglected and not seen. Such a situation is the worst possible situation that can affect the behavior of citizens in the pandemics.  This situation also creates a kind of social chaos. In this case, the citizens accuse each other of not following the protocols and attribute it to the government's weakness and inadequacy in controlling affairs. The most important components of political trust are: the quality of the relationship between the government and the nation and the trust between them in the historical past, the degree of power of governments in managing the economy especially groups affected by the pandemic, transparency of government, free flow of information which does not increase general anxiety, and is polinfodemics. We believe that a specific type of disinformation at the political level has occurred during this pandemic, for which we propose the name ''polinfodemic''. In our view, polinfodemic means generating fake or distorted information or manipulating some information against a nation by another government directly or through opposition parties in order to manipulate the mental health of that nation, distort the trust between the state and nation, and halt the interventions that are launched in controlling the epidemics. It is a moral responsibility for the media and governments around the world to prevent of any form of polinfodemics in pandemics.

Keywords: Political trust, Polinfodemics, COVID 19, Moral responsibility
 
Abbreviations: Political Trust in COVID 19