Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

12-2020

Abstract

COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 (Nah & Siau, 2020; Xie et al. 2020). As of November 2020, globally, there are more than 50 million people infected with COVID-19 and more than 1 million deaths. Different countries have different responses to the COVID-19 pandemic because of different economic developments and different cultures in each country. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have an impact on almost every industry (Siau & Long, 2009). This research focuses on understanding the effects of ICT on COVID-19 pandemic management. In this research, we utilize the Human Capital Theory (HCT), which suggests that human capital is an important factor in the development of society (Sweetland, 1996), as our theoretical foundation. ICT can help with contact tracing, which is important for pandemic management. Better ICT also means that people have access to more data and up-to-date information (Siau & Shen, 2002). Thus, we hypothesize that countries with higher ICT development levels should be able to manage the COVID-19 pandemic better. The dataset we used in this study includes the (i) ICT Development Index (IDI), which is the indicator of ICT from ITU data, (ii) population, and (iii) data related to Covid-19 (from January to July 2020) by countries from Our World in Data. The ICT dataset we used is from IDI 2017. We divided the data into five levels – each level is an increment of 20 percent from the previous level. The countries having the most Internet users are classified as level 5, and those with the least Internet users are in level 1. In this research, we conducted a two-way ANOVA test on the effects of ICT on the total cases and deaths of COVID-19. The results are exactly the opposite of our hypotheses. Further analyses, including the use of national cultures (Siau et al., 2010), are carried out to explain the results.

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Public Health

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2020), Virtual Conference, December 13-16

First Page

1

Last Page

1

City or Country

Virtual

Additional URL

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347495873_COVID-19_Information_and_Communication_Technologies_on_Pandemic_Management

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