Assessment of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (Kap) Towards Covid-19 in Ethiopia

Abstract COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory disease that is caused by a novel coronavirus and was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. As of June 26, 2021, in Ethiopia, the number of cases has reached over 275,769, 4,302 death and 258,203 are recovered. A total of 1023(84.3%) and 191(15.7%) were male and female, respectively. The study revealed that overall mean agreement on covid-19 related knowledge, attitude, practice and psychological score were 43.9% (533/1214), 49.0% (595/1214), 52.6% (639/1214) and 53.8% (653/1214), respectively. There was no significant association between Covid-19 knowledge and education level, gender, age group, marital status; however, a significant association were found individuals who had monthly income below 15,000ETB, being employed and resided in urban. Psychological response of individual was significantly associated with being employed and married. Individual`s covid-19 practice such as regular use of personal protective equipment’s (PPE), washing hand, and not touching contaminated surface were significantly related with psychological response and perceived level of attitude. Interestingly, 88.7% of participants had negative attitude towards existence of Covid-19 in Ethiopia where they didn’t believe on it because they never saw any patient during study period and 88.0% of them were pessimists in doing and follow every preventive instruction against the disease. The study showed that participants had satisfactory knowledge, attitude, practice and psychological towards COVID-19 and the preventive measures. However, during the pandemic they did have negative attitude towards existence of Covid-19 in Ethiopia. Large scare studies with defined social health model may be considered in the future.