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

Whereas the highest knowledge score was recorded on the "preventive and control measures" subscale with a score of 83.0%. Overall, the total knowledge score (66.1%) was moderate, which was unexpected as this epidemiological survey was conducted during the advanced stage of the pandemic. Further analysis of the findings was directed towards determining demographic factors associated with knowledge gaps among participants. Such findings will be valuable for public-health policymakers and healthcare professionals to recognize target populations for health education activities on the COVID-19 outbreak. This is critical as the countries involved in the study are still at the beginning of the outbreak and governments took extreme measures to contain the pandemic. But such measures, which include imposing a curfew, are virtually useless unless were accompanied by responsible individuals' preventative practices (3) . In this study as well as in previous studies in China, US, and UK, an association has been noticed between particular demographic characteristics and knowledge, beliefs, and practices towards COVID-19 (1, 15) . For example, in China, an association between non-adherence to preventive and control measures and male gender, occupation of "students", marital status of "others", residing in other parts of China, and poor COVID-19 knowledge has been reported (1). Those findings were supported by previous studies regarding age and gender patterns of risk-taking behaviours (16, 17) . In the US and UK, Geldsetzer (2020) has . 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.