This study is limited in being cross-sectional and relying on hypothesized modeling to infer causality. This is potentially errorprone and can only be confirmed by specific longitudinal tests of the hypotheses proposed above. There are potential limitations related to measurement imposed by the need to be parsimonious in questioning due to use of telephone interviews. Where this is not done refusal rates would have been unacceptably high [12] raising serious questions about representativeness. As a consequence, construct validity for some latent variables was weaker than expected, for example, only two items were scaled to measured trust in informal information giving a low internal consistency. We re-ran the SEM treating the two trust items as separate which gave almost identical associations with different situation awareness variables, so we entered their combined score as a latent variable in the final model. Only one item measured self-efficacy. This is generally not considered adequate but does have precedent indicating it is valid for predicting behavioral change [9] . Finally, this random sample, closely representative of the population of Hong Kong and collected early in the epidemic phase, nonetheless was slightly older and less-well educated than the general population. This was likely due to unavoidable sampling bias from surveying in the early evening to 10pm. Many young adults do not return home from work until after this time and were thereby not sampled. The results may in part reflect this bias. Otherwise the response rate was high at 69% and excellent compared to similar studies [12] . Some of these above limitations may also have contributed to the low explained variance of the model.