Community Responses toward COVID-19 Pandemic: An Online Survey Study

Abstract

COVID-19 has become a frightening pandemic and has spread throughout the world with an unprecedentedly high death rate. Community compliance with government appeals must be accompanied by knowledge, attitudes, and practices in dealing with this epidemic. This study aims to investigate the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Kolaka residents against the COVID-19 outbreak. This research is descriptive-analytic with a Cross-Sectional approach. The sample used in this study were 1,010 respondents aged 17 to 65 years, having gmail and y-mail accounts, mastering the internet became the criteria for respondent inclusion in this study. The questionnaire used was the adoption of previous studies and modified according to conditions. Data were analyzed bivariate using the Chi-Square test with standard p-value<0.05. The results obtained showed that the Kolaka community had good knowledge (49.6%), a confident attitude of controlling the plague (70.4%), and had a high level of vigilance (79.6%) towards COVID-19. There is a relationship between knowledge with practice p-value=0.000, while attitude has no relationship with practice with p-value=0.862. The massive dissemination of information through existing media has greatly helped the community increase their knowledge of COVID-19, which will further support the formation of a confident attitude to control this disease and increase vigilance in their daily life practices during this pandemic.