Ibadan Urban Dwellers’ Perception on the Use of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for COVID-19

Abstract

SARS coronavirus cases have been reported all across the world in the previous two years. The rate of transmission has been steadily increasing over time. This study examines residents’ knowledge, attitudes, and preventive activities for SARS-CoV-2 prevention in five local government areas in Ibadan’s urban zone (total population: 1,886,800 inhabitants, census 2016).During the months of November and December, 2021, a cross-sectional survey based on the health belief model was conducted with a simple random sample of 355 respondents from densely populated regions of urban Ibadan. SARS-CoV-2 was known by a total of 262 people. Only 33.5% of the total respondents were concerned about SARS coronavirus. A small percentage (4.5%) had previously been diagnosed with SARS coronavirus, 66.7% considered a SARS-CoV-2 infection to be serious, yet only 33.5% were concerned about SARS coronavirus. The results are inconsistent in reporting preventive practices, either community-level interventions (e.g., quarantining/self-isolating after returning from travel, 23.9%; actively maintaining a certain distance between myself and people outside, 31.8%) or personal preventive behaviours (e.g., use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, 53.2%). Participants who reported willingness to accept a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine were more likely to perceive the risk of contracting it as higher (aOR = 1.02, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.01–1.04), as well as knowing if a friend had previously been diagnosed with SARS coronavirus (aOR = 2.92, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.62–5.55), according to a multivariate analysis using stepwise binary logistic regression which had a 77.27% predictive accuracy, using a test-train, confusion matrix split. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest that future interventions promoting SARS-CoV-2 prevention among inhabitants of urban Ibadan should focus on individuals’ views of SARS coronavirus vulnerability, highlighting the benefits of personal protective behaviors.