The Philippines is one of the countries in 

Asia known to be vulnerable to the severe effects of fire

disasters as the country loses a considerable amount worth of damages due to fire disasters. The
study aimed to determine the factors that significantly affect Filipinos' perceived effectiveness
for fire prevention preparedness in urban areas by integrating Protection Motivation Theory and
the extended Theory of Planned Behavior. 503 respondents voluntarily participated in the self-
administered online survey questionnaire distributed among Filipinos residing in the National
Capital Region, Philippines. Utilizing the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach, results
showed that media platforms (MP), fire experience (FE), and fire insurance policies (FI) had
significant effects on fire prevention knowledge (KFP). In addition, FE, FI, and KFP variables
established significant effects on perceived severity (PS) and perceived vulnerability (PV) which
eventually affected perceived behavioral control (PBC) and attitude toward the behavior (ATB).
PBC and ATB were found to affect subjective norm (SN); thus, PBC, ATB, and SN variables were
determined to have substantial effects on safe behavior (SB) and perceived effectiveness (PE).
This paper is the first study in the Philippines that investigated the current fire mitigation
strategies. The results will be valuable among researchers and policymakers in creating a
compelling future fire mitigation intervention to improve people's fire preparedness and safety
behavior. Finally, the SEM constructs of this study can be adapted and extended to determine
fire mitigation effectiveness worldwide.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in China in late 2019, government administrators have
implemented traffic restriction policies to prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, highway
traffic volumes obtained from ETC data in some provinces did not return to the levels of
previous years after the end of the traffic restriction policy, suggesting that traffic restriction
policy may have long-term effects. This paper proposed a method that analyzes traffic restriction
policies' long-term and short-term impact on highway traffic volume under COVID-19. This
method first analyzes the long-term and short-term impacts of traffic restriction policies on the
highway traffic volume using the Prophet model combined with the concept of traffic volume
loss. It further investigates the relationship between COVID-19 cases and the long-term and
short-term impacts of the traffic restriction policy using Granger causality and the impulse
response function of the Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model. The results showed that
during the COVID-19 pandemic, highway traffic in Zhejiang Province decreased by about 95.5%,
and the short-term impact of COVID-19 cases was most pronounced on the second day.
However, the long-term effects were relatively small when the traffic restriction policy ended
and was verified by data from other provinces. These results will provide decision support for
traffic management and provide recommendations for future traffic impact assessments in the
event of similar epidemics.