Knowledge and practices towards COVID-19 during its outbreak: a multinational cross-sectional study

Abdallah Y Naser; Eman Zmaily Dahmash; Hassan Alwafi; Zahra Khalil Alsairafi; Ahmed M. Al Rajeh; Yosra J Alhartani; Fawaz Mohammad Turkistani; Hamad S. Alyami

Furthermore, a significant negative effect on the knowledge score was the employment status, specifically among students (p<0.05). The results are aligned to the finding that lack of knowledge is related to young people (18 -29 years) . Such findings are alarming, as the lack of knowledge about COVID-19 is correlated with a higher prevalence rate of the infection (1, 22) . Therefore, there is a need for improving students' knowledge about COVID-19 by means of health education, which may also result in improvements in their practices towards COVID-19. Such results could support the decision made by many countries including Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in taking a political commitment to temporally close all educational institutions to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, the action involved 188 countries, affecting around 1.5 billion learners. The mode of teaching moved into emergency remote learning (22, 23) . Yet, although the closure of schools and educational facilities is a good mean to prevent young adults from mixing with others, it will not prevent exposure even with curfew laws. Young adults will always go out and get exposed to the risk of getting infected as the level of knowledge is low. A recent study on COVID-19 concluded that educational institutions closures alone would preclude only 2-4% of deaths, which is a lot less than other social distancing interventions. The integration of additional social distancing strategies along with educational institutions closures needs to be considered (24) . Furthermore, the results of our study pertinent to knowledge scores stratification according to demographics are in line with studies on COVID-19 in China and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreaks among . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.