The knowledge and practice towards COVID-19 pandemic prevention among residents of Ethiopia. An online cross-sectional study

  1. Daniel Bekele
  2. Tadesse Tolossa
  3. Reta Tsegaye
  4. Wondesen Teshome

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Abstract

The disease from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been considered as an international concern and a pandemic starting from the declaration of the World Health Organization (WHO) as an outbreak disease.

Objective

The objective of this study is to assess the prevention of knowledge and practices towards the COVID-19 pandemic among the residents of Ethiopia.

Methods

An online cross-sectional study was conducted among a sample of Ethiopian residents via social platforms of the author’s network with popular social media such as Facebook, Telegram, and email. The snowball sampling was employed to recruit participants. In doing so, we collected the responses of 341 participants successfully from April 15 to 22, 2020. The collected data were analyzed by STATA version 14 software and descriptive statistics were employed to summarize the knowledge and practices of the community towards the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results

The majority of respondents 80.5% were male. About 91.2% of the participants heard about the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, out of 341 participants 90.0%, 93.8% of them knew that the COVID-19 pandemic was prevented by maintaining social distance and frequent handwashing, respectively. This shows that the prevention knowledge of the participants towards the COVID-19 by maintaining social distance and frequent handwashing was high. However, out of 341 participants only 61%,84% of them practiced social distance and frequent handwashing toward COVID-19, respectively.

Conclusions

The majority of the participants knew the ways to protect themselves from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), but there was a great problem of changing this prevention knowledge to practices. This shows that there is an action gap between having prevention knowledge of the COVID-19 and implementing it into practices to tackle the spread of the COVID-19 among communities. Therefore, the concerned body should be focused on providing awareness and education for the community regarding the implementation of prevention knowledge to practices.

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0234585
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.01.127381: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Strength and limitation of the study: The strength of this study was it is the first study to assess the prevention knowledge and practice of prevention knowledge towards the Novel coronavirus diseases among the residents of Ethiopia. There are some limitations to this research. First, questions related to knowledge and practices are not validated. The second and the major limitation of this study was the data collected by an online distribution of the survey through the Social Media and only individual with the access of Social Media and internet can participate in the study and this study cannot represent the overall population of the country. Conclusions: In this study, almost the prevention knowledge of the respondent towards the COVID-19 pandemic was high. But, the practice of the respondents prevention knowledge to the implementation very low and the practices score of the respondent was (mean=3.09), which very low and which indicates that the practices the respondents towards the COVID-19 pandemic was poor. As far as the result of this study shows the respondents had a good prevention knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic. To tackle the spreads of the COVID-19 pandemic in the community the prevention knowledge of the community should be implemented into the practices and the stakeholders should play their significant contribution by teaching the community in ways to implementing the prevention knowledge to combat the spread of the Novel coronavirus pandemics.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.06.01.127381v1 on bioRxiv