Department of Statistics, College of Natural and Computational Sciences, Dire Dawa University, Dire Dawa, Ethiopia.
Department of Public Health, Institute of Health Science, Wollega University, Nekemte, Ethiopia.
PLoS One. 2021 Jan 28;16(1):e0234585. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234585. eCollection 2021.
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.
The objective of this study is to assess the prevention of knowledge and practices towards the COVID-19 pandemic among the residents of Ethiopia.
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.
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.
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.
新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）疾病自世界卫生组织（WHO）宣布为爆发性疾病以来，被认为是国际关注的公共卫生事件和大流行。
本研究旨在评估埃塞俄比亚居民对 COVID-19 大流行的预防知识和实践。
通过作者网络的社交平台，对埃塞俄比亚居民进行了一项在线横断面研究，其中包括 Facebook、Telegram 和电子邮件等流行社交媒体。采用雪球抽样法招募参与者。在这样做的过程中，我们成功地从 2020 年 4 月 15 日至 22 日收集了 341 名参与者的回复。使用 STATA 版本 14 软件对收集的数据进行分析，并采用描述性统计方法总结社区对 COVID-19 大流行的知识和实践。
大多数受访者为男性（80.5%）。约 91.2%的参与者听说过 COVID-19 大流行。此外，在 341 名参与者中，有 90.0%、93.8%的人分别知道保持社交距离和经常洗手可以预防 COVID-19 大流行。这表明，参与者对 COVID-19 通过保持社交距离和经常洗手的预防知识较高。然而，在 341 名参与者中，只有 61%、84%的人分别在 COVID-19 方面实践了保持社交距离和经常洗手。
大多数参与者都知道保护自己免受新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）侵害的方法，但将这种预防知识转化为实践存在很大的问题。这表明，社区在预防 COVID-19 方面，存在从知识到实践的行动差距。因此，有关部门应重点关注为社区提供有关预防知识转化为实践的认识和教育。
