<p>Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Toward Prevention and Early Detection of COVID-19 and Associated Factors Among Religious Clerics and Traditional Healers in Gondar Town, Northwest Ethiopia: A Community-Based Study</p>

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 control measures efforts are affected by the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the public, particularly religious clerics and traditional healers, who have close contact and are widely accepted by a significant number of community members. Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted to determine knowledge, attitudes and practices towards COVID-19 and its associated factors among religious clerics and traditional healers in Gondar town. Study participants who met our inclusion criteria were selected using a simple random sampling technique. Data were collected by trained data collectors through face-to-face interviews. The reliability of the questionnaire was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Knowledge, attitudes and practices scores were calculated to give the overall knowledge, attitude and practice score. Binary logistic regression was fitted to identify associated factors and odds ratio was used to measure the strength of the association. Results: A total of 410 religious clerics and traditional healers were included in the study with a response rate of 97.1%. Of the total participants, 60.7% (95%: CI (56-65%)) had good knowledge, 34.1% (95%: CI (30-39%)) had a positive attitude and 15.6% (95%: CI (12-19%)) had good practices towards prevention and early detection of COVID-19. Less than one third of the participants practiced physical distancing (28%) and facemask use (17.8%). In multivariate logistic regression, age, educational status and marital status were significantly associated with knowledge score. Likewise, age and marital status were significantly associated with the positive attitude score. In addition, age, educational status, and the presence of underlying disease were significantly associated with the good practice score. Conclusion: Majority of the participants had poor practice and negative attitudes. Therefore, there should be a sensitization program to fill the gap in the knowledge, attitudes and practice measures of COVID-19 especially for elderly and illiterates.

Knowledge, attitude, perception, and preventative practices towards COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review

“…The included studies were all conducted in sub-Saharan Africa and published in 2020. Ten of the studies were conducted in Ethiopia [10,12,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], eight in Nigeria [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], three in Cameroon [45][46][47], two in Uganda [9,48], one each in Rwanda [49], Ghana [50], Democratic Republic of Congo [51], Sudan [52], and Sierra Leone [53], (Fig 2). A total number of 14,353 study participants were reported in the included studies, with over half (51%) of them being males.…”

“…The KAP components of the included studies (Fig 3), showed that participants from 24 studies had a good knowledge [9, 10, 29-32, 34-46, 48-50, 52, 53], with only 4 studies reporting a low knowledge of COVID-19 [12,33,47,51]. Participants in fifteen studies had a good attitude/perception [29, 34-37, 41-49, 52], average in five studies [10,12,33,40,53], and low in four studies [9,31,38,51]. Good preventative practice towards COVID-19 was found in twelve studies [9, 30, 36-38, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52], average in six [10,12,29,39,48,53], and low in other six studies [31-33, 35, 47, 51].…”

COVID-19 Knowledge, Attitude, Practices and Their Associated Factors Among Dessie City Residents, Northeast Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…But our finding is comparable with the 66.6% and 56.6% study finding from northern Ethiopia. 13 The study findings also revealed that television (79%), radio (37%) and social media (31.6%) are the major sources of COVID-19 information. A study from the southern part of the country 16 also revealed that TV/radio is the major source (80.3%) of COVID-19 information.…”

“…This finding is much higher than other studies in the northern part of the country those reported 42.9% and 60.7% knowledgeable participants. 12 , 13 The variation might be explained by the difference in the characteristics of study participants, change in the study period, inadequate access to COVID-19 information and different knowledge measurement tools used by researchers. Though our study reveals a high level of knowledge among participants, the knowledge varies from one coronavirus transmission and prevention method to another.…”

<p>When the Big Shots Deviate: On the KAP of Religious Clerics Regarding Prevention of COVID-19 [Letter]</p>

“…We have read the paper by Asmelash et al 1 with great interest. In Pakistan, the religious pundits enjoy a huge following as well, coherent with this fact we would like to share our viewpoint towards the study.…”