Abstract
Japan’s countermeasures against COVID-19 include requests to refrain from going out of the house due to the declaration of a state of emergency, restrictions on entry into Japan, requests for simultaneous closure of schools, loans to small and medium-sized enterprises and individual business owners, and distribution of cloth masks to all households. However, these measures are not predetermined to prepare for a pandemic. Therefore, they have been considered and established each time during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public’s evaluation of the government’s COVID-19 measures remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a quantitative evaluation of the measures by multiple regression analysis using questionnaire survey data and also a qualitative evaluation by newspaper analysis. The questionnaire survey was conducted in early February 2021, targeting 521 people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. For the newspaper analysis, an Internet newspaper search of Yomiuri Shimbun was used. The results showed that 56.4 % of the respondents rated the government’s overall countermeasures against the new corona viruses as unsatisfactory, indicating a generally low level of satisfaction. On the other hand, “trust in the government” had a significant positive impact on satisfaction with COVID-19 measures, but with the exception of the special flat-rate benefit. This indicates that trust in the government is a major factor in the level of agreement with pandemic measures. In addition, service sector workers tended to be less satisfied with the first declaration of a state of emergency, and the reason was that the business situation remained sluggish even after the emergency declaration was lifted. Also, newspaper articles suggested that appropriate measures to support economic recovery were needed.
