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

Good knowledge is vital to enable individuals to have better practices in pandemics and outbreaks. A study on SARS demonstrated that a higher knowledge score was found to be connected with improved adherence to precautionary practices (11, 26) . Of interest, an income of ≥ 1,409 $ (p<0.05) had a significant negative association with the knowledge score in our cohort, showing that high income does not improve knowledge and practices. However, this is contrary to a previous study on the influenza pandemic, where there was no association between knowledge and income (26). A possible reason for such result is that the higher income of individuals is accompanied with low education level. The current study showed that knowledge scores significantly differed across marital status categories (P<0.002), divorced participants had a significant negative association with COVID-19 knowledge score (p<0.01). Our findings were in line with the results obtained from the study on COVID-19 in China, which revealed a statistically significant difference in knowledge score according to marital status, however, they found that the category denotes as others (included divorced and widowed, separated, remarried) showing the highest score in knowledge (11.0 out of 12.0) (91.7%), P <0.001) (1). This difference could be justified by two elements. Firstly, different countries might have different cultural dimension and hence results could not be compared. Secondly, the group used in the Chinese study included all divorced, separated, widowed and remarried individuals and hence we could not build a good correlation (1).