Assessment of Awareness and Preventive Practice of Corona Virus (COVID-19) Among Communities; The Case of Kaffa Zone, South Western Ethiopia

Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus and resultant coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have evolved into a pandemic, requiring persons around the world to attend to rapidly changing messages about public health and take immediate actions. Related to this, community’s awareness toward the preventive practice of coronavirus is assessed. Hence, the purpose of this was to investigate the awareness and preventive practice among communities. Cross-sectional survey design was conducted among 400 participants. Simple random sampling, technique particularly lottery method was used to select the study participants. Data was collected by using questionnaire and observation. After the data was collected, data entry and analysis were done using SPSS version 26. Hence, data gathered using questionnaire and observation was computed by using simple descriptive statistics (percentage and frequencies). Regarding awareness level of communities 61% of respondents aware that covid-19 transmits from victim by hand shaking and close contacts. And hence, 37.8% of participants aware that awareness creation was done by health organization service centers. And hence, the findings in this study revealed that community’s awareness was high on each specific aspect of COVID-19 among the study participants. Communities are not still totally pay attention to aware about COVID 19, crisis. According to finding in this research communities wash their hand in order to prevent covid-19 better than the previous. Kaffa zone as well as stakeholders should have to provide ample information for all communities including urban and rural societies to aware about COVID-19 and practice how to prevent.