Knowledge, perception and attitudes in Regard to COVID-19 Pandemic in Peruvian Population

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Latin American countries have been profoundly affected by COVID-19. Due to the alarming incidence of identified cases, we intended to explore which psycho-social elements may be influencing the poor adherence toward the mandatory control measures among the population. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to assess the knowledge, attitudes and vulnerability perception of Peruvians during the coronavirus outbreak.METHOD: Using a web-based cross-sectional survey, we collected data from 225 self-selected participants, evaluating demographic information. The overall respondents were between 18 and 29 years old (56.8%), being female (n = 134), belonging to educated groups, and graduated professionals (69.3%), the majority of them. RESULTS: Logistic regression showed that knowledge is highly correlated with education (p=0.031), occupation (p=0.002), and age (p= 0.016). Our study identified that, although people reported adequate knowledge by identifying expected symptoms and virus transmission ways in COVID-19 disease. There is a significant perceived susceptibility to contract the mentioning virus, displaying stigmatized behavior (59.1%) and fear of contracting the virus from others (70.2%). Additionally, it is reported to lack people's confidence to health national authorities on the sanitary responses (62.7%), preparedness for the disease (76.9%) and the lack of adequate measures to deal with it (51.1%). CONCLUSION: We suggest that public policies consider guidelines on knowledge translation and risk communication strategies for both containing psychological responses in a timely manner and ensuring compliance with public control measures by the population.

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices toward the novel coronavirus among Bangladeshis: Implications for mitigation measures

“…Gender, age, occupation, and knowledge scores had a strong effect on the participants' opinions on both attitude and practice responses in logistic regression analysis. A similar observation was reported in Sudan and Peru [45,53]. This clearly indicates that policy makers must better educate the public through awareness campaigns as knowledge creates a more positive attitude to harness better practice and encourage constructive criticism.…”

“…This study mainly targeted participants with a university-level education and so the findings cannot represent the KAP of Bangladeshi general public. This is one of the major limitations of online research [40,43,44,53]. A wider study comprising participants from wider sociodemographics helps overcome this limitation.…”

COVID-19 pandemic fear and anxiety among healthcare professionals in Pakistan

“…In another comparative study being conducted in the USA reports that participants were more concerned about COVID-19 as compared to seasonal in uenza (20,23). In Latin America One of the greatest fear among the evaluated population is being in contact with healthcare professionals (24).…”

Investigating Iranians’ Attitude, Practices, and Perceived Self-Efficacy towards Coronavirus Preventive Behaviors

“…A study in the US conducted on the evaluation of COVID-19-related knowledge, attitude, and practice among chronically ill adults reported that people with limited health literacy had poorer attitudes towards corona disease (19). Another study in Peru showed that people with higher education reported a better understanding of COVID-19 control measures and preventive strategies (20). The difference between the ndings of the above studies and the present study is due to the type of education level division in the present study.…”