Knowledge toward COVID-19 Pandemic during Panic Period Among Communities of Arsi Zone, Southeast Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: The world faces the greatest socio-economic shock in a
generation, coming at a time of acute inequality, ecological fragility and
growing distrust within and amongst societies due to Corona virus disease
19, which has health as well as humanitarian and development crisis that is
threatening to leave deep social, economic and political scars for years to
come, particularly in countries found in fragility, poverty and conflict.
Objectives: The overall objective of this study was to assess level of
knowledge and factors associated toward COVID 19 among residents in Arsi
Zone, South East Ethiopia.
Methods: A community based cross-sectional study was conducted among
Data entry and cleaning was done using Epi Info version 3.5.4 and exported
to SPSS version 22 for analysis. Descriptive statistics was used to depict
frequency, mean and percentages of the characteristics. Logistic regression was run to see significant predictors of knowledge and 95% CI at p-value
<0.05 were used declare significant association.
Results: About 54.1% of the respondents had good knowledge about
COVID 19. Being government employee AOR 3.37 95% CI (1.16, 9.79) and
income> 2000 birr AOR 2.8 95% CI (1.33, 5.90) were significantly
associated with having good knowledge about COVID 19.
Conclusions: Low socio-economic status was more likely to be related with
low earning which might limit access to information regarding COVID 19.
Hence, targeting information dissemination about COVID 19 to low income
societies might improve the level of knowledge about COVID 19.