“I walk around like my hands are covered in mud”: food safety and hand hygiene behaviours of Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives To investigate how and why Canadians engaged in different food handling and hand hygiene behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Seven online, text-based focus groups were conducted with a total of 42 participants. Eligible participants included adults living in Canada that prepared meals at home at least once per week. Focus groups took place from May-June 2020 and followed a semi-structured question guide. Participants were asked about their practices relating to food preparation habits at home; food purchasing, handling, and storage; hand hygiene and sanitation; and information sources about food safety concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis was conducted using the Theoretical Domains Framework as a coding guide. Results The most notable changes in behaviour since the onset of the pandemic were seen in participants’ handwashing, sanitation, and grocery shopping practices. Participants tended to perceive grocery store employees, shoppers, and food service staff as having inadequate sanitation precautions and, therefore, as a source of COVID- 19 transmission risk. They heavily relied on public health, medical, and government officials as sources of information. Feelings of stress and anxiety appeared to be linked to certain sanitation behaviours. Many participants displayed a general apathy toward routine food safety practices such as safe food storage at home. Conclusion This work supports the need for clear and concise messaging for hand hygiene and food safety behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic and in future times of crisis. It also highlights a need for ongoing food safety messaging.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".