Knowledge and Attitude for Medical Students towards COVID-19

Background & Aim : COVID-19, as an emerging infectious disease, affects the whole world. The causative agent for the disease is coronavirus acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and typical symptoms of the disease include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Also, muscle pain, sputum production, sore throat, lack of taste and red eyes are among the less common symptoms. In severe cases, the disease can cause severe respiratory failure and even death. COVID-19 is transmitted from sick people to healthy people through respiratory droplets. Disease spread can be prevented by washing hands and other hygiene measures . The rate of transmission and prevalence for the disease is higher than other infectious diseases, however, the main point in controlling the disease is the knowledge and attitude of the community towards Corona disease, which can play a key role in controlling the disease and reduce the increasing trend. It is very important to pay attention to the attitude and awareness of people involved in patient care. According to the literature review, no study has been conducted on the knowledge and attitude for medical students towards COVID-19, therefore, the current research was conducted to determine the attitude and knowledge of medical students across the country about COVID-19 . Materail & Methods : The study was performed as descriptive cross-sectional. Data were collected through a virtual self-administered questionnaire. 420 medical students in the country participated in this study by voluntary sampling from April 20 to May 6, 2016. The final data was obtained by removing 10% of the questionnaires due to incomplete filling of 381 samples. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect information. The questionnaire included three sections: demographic characteristics, attitude and knowledge about COVID-19. The first part of the questionnaire contained questions related to demographic characteristics including age, gender, degree, field of study, semester, type of (58.3%) in bachelor degree, 8 people (2.1%) in master degree and 133 people (34.9%) were studying in professional doctoral degree. 271 students (71.1%) were students of 1-4 semesters and 93 students (24.4%) of them were studying in 5-8 semesters. 112 students (29.4%) were studying in medicine, 129 (33.9%) were studying in nursing and 115 (30.2%) were studying in paramedical fields. Also, 57.5% of the students were natives and 96.9% of the students had no work experience in the corona sector and 83.5% of the students did not participate in the virtual courses of the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization related to the corona virus. The mean and standard deviation for students' attitudes toward COVID-19 were generally 58.75 ± 5.56 and their knowledge was 41.61 ± 6.27. The results showed that there was no significant relationship between attitude and demographic characteristics. Besides, there was a significant relationship between students' knowledge score and age (p <0.001), gender (p = 0.002), degree (p <0.001), field of study (p <0.001) and semester under study (p <0.001). However, there was no significant relationship between students' knowledge score, type of student residence, work experience in the coronary department and history of participating in virtual courses related to coronavirus . and improve students' attitudes toward COVID-19 .