African Perspective of Social Distancing in Pandemics: Adoption Challenges

In public health, social distancing is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease, by maintaining a physical distance between people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization suggested the term, ‘physical distancing,’ as opposed to ‘social distancing’, arguing that it is a physical distance which prevents transmission; people can remain socially connected via technology. This paper discusses the concepts of social distance, social distancing, physical distancing, self-quarantine, self-isolation, symptomatic, asymptomatic and parasymptomatic cases as they relate to COVID-19 and African perception of pandemic diseases. Although the idea of social distancing is not novel to the Africans, but a challenge in its implementation is that historically, social distancing is rather applied to non-infectious cases like mental illness, epilepsy, infertility, aging, victims of sexual violence and the like. The paper utilizes health-related theories and pertinent empirical findings to explain African perspective of social distancing and the challenges of adoption in pandemic situations. The theories on health risk perception reviewed include the protection motivation theory, the health belief model, the extended parallel process model and the precaution adoption process model. From consumer psychology background on product adoption, a conceptual model for ‘social distancing’ adoption in pandemics was advanced. These ancient and novel health-related theories and models were applied to explain the erroneous understanding, perception and adoption challenges of social distancing in Africa, leading to possible increase in the spread of the coronavirus.