Knowledge and Attitude for Medical Students towards COVID-19

Abstract

Background & Aim: COVID-19, as an emerging infectious disease, affects the whole world. The causative agent for the disease is coronavirus acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and typical symptoms of the disease include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Also, muscle pain, sputum production, sore throat, lack of taste and red eyes are among the less common symptoms. In severe cases, the disease can cause severe respiratory failure and even death. COVID-19 is transmitted from sick people to healthy people through respiratory droplets. Disease spread can be prevented by washing hands and other hygiene measures. The rate of transmission and prevalence for the disease is higher than other infectious diseases, however, the main point in controlling the disease is the knowledge and attitude of the community towards Corona disease, which can play a key role in controlling the disease and reduce the increasing trend. It is very important to pay attention to the attitude and awareness of people involved in patient care. According to the literature review, no study has been conducted on the knowledge and attitude for medical students towards COVID-19, therefore, the current research was conducted to determine the attitude and knowledge of medical students across the country about COVID-19. Materail & Methods: The study was performed as descriptive cross-sectional. Data were collected through a virtual self-administered questionnaire. 420 medical students in the country participated in this study by voluntary sampling from April 20 to May 6, 2016. The final data was obtained by removing 10% of the questionnaires due to incomplete filling of 381 samples. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect information. The questionnaire included three sections: demographic characteristics, attitude and knowledge about COVID-19. The first part of the questionnaire contained questions related to demographic characteristics including age, gender, degree, field of study, semester, type of residence and university. The second part, consisting of 16 phrases, was set to determine how students' attitudes toward COVID-19 disease' is based on the Likert scale of five options "totally disagree, disagree, have no opinion, agree, strongly agree" and were considered for each phrase a score of 1 to 5. The awareness section consisted of 4 dimensions (nature of disease, disease transmission, care and prevention, diagnosis and treatment) in the form of three options "yes and no and I do not know" that 1 positive score was applied for each correct answer. Content and face validity were used to determine the validity of the questionnaire. The opinion of 7 faculty members in the university about the questionnaire was obtained and their corrective opinions were applied in the questionnaire. The reliability of the attitude questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.85 and the reliability of the knowledge questionnaire with Kuder Richardson coefficient was 0.86. Data analysis was performed by one-way ANOVA, Pearson correlation coefficient and independent t-test with SPSS software version 16. Also, the significance level in the research was considered 0.05. Participants had full authority to complete the virtual questionnaire and data were collected anonymously. Results: Out of 381 samples, 252 (66.1%) were female students. The age range of students was 16 to 37 years and 51.1% of them belonged to the age group of 21-25 years. 18 people (4.7%) in associate degree, 222 people