Objectives To determine peoples' knowledge, attitudes, risk perceptions, and practices to provide policymakers pieces of field-based evidence and help them in the management of the COVID-19 epidemic. Methods This population-based survey was conducted using multi-stage stratified and cluster sampling in Shiraz, Iran. A total of 1331 persons were interviewed. The questionnaires were completed by face-to-face interviews. Univariable and multivariable (linear regression) data analyses were done using SPSS. Results The participants answered 63% of questions regarding knowledge, and 78% of questions regarding practice correctly. Only, 4.8% knew about common symptoms of COVID-19 and 7.3% about warning signs that require referral to hospitals. Males, lower educated people, and elders had a lower level of knowledge and poorer practices. Knowledge was also lower in the marginalized (socially deprived) people. Knowledge and practices' correlation was 37%. Overall, 43.6% considered themselves at high risk of COVID-19, and 50% considered it as a severe disease. This disease had negative effects on most participants' routine activities (69.1%). The participants preferred to follow the news from the national TV/ Radio, social networks, and foreign satellite channels, respectively. Conclusions Encouragement of people to observe preventive measures and decreasing social stress, especially among males, lower educated people, elders, and marginalized groups, are highly recommended.

. Both knowledge and attitude can play key roles in the prevention of novel COVID-19. This cross-sectional study was conducted on a statistical sample of pregnant women in southwestern Iran between March and April 2020 to evaluate their knowledge and attitude toward this condition. So, pregnant mothers registered in antenatal clinics affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical Sciences were called and asked to fill in a three-part online questionnaire including sociodemographic characteristics, obstetric/medical history, and knowledge/attitude toward COVID-19. P -values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant. The mean score of knowledge among 540 respondents was 34 (±4.1) out of 43. Also, 44.3% answered more than 80% of the items correctly. Higher knowledge scores were accordingly associated with marriage duration, area of residence, health insurance coverage, socioeconomic status (SES), and self-rated health status. However, a strong relationship was found between knowledge, SES, and health insurance coverage with reference to multivariate analysis results. Moreover, majority of the pregnant women and their households expressed their concern about using preventive measures against COVID-19. Although most respondents were moderately worried about becoming infected with COVID-19, 264 (48.9%) cases reported that they were very much anxious about their newborns being infected with COVID-19 and 388 (71.9%) individuals asserted that they were worried about their mortality due to this infection. Besides, most mothers maintained that they had some degrees of rumination, which could interfere with their routine daily chores. Hence, health policy-makers should pay much focus on educating pregnant mothers to help them prevent mental exhaustion.

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Background The novel coronavirus disease 2019 has severely affected communities around the world. Fear and stress of being infected, along with pressure caused by lockdown, prevention protocols, and the economic downturn, increased tension among people, which consequently led to the rise of domestic violence (DV). Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the rate of change in DV and its associated factors during the COVID-19 epidemic in Shiraz, Iran. Methods In this cross-sectional study, 653 individuals with the age of over 15 years from Shiraz were participated through snowball sampling and filled out an online questionnaire through the WhatsApp platform. A 51-item, self-administered and multidimensional (knowledge, attitude, and practice) questionnaire was designed and assessed 653 participants. The gathered data was analyzed using SPSS software (version 25), and variables with a p-value of less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results In this study, 64.2% of the respondents were within the age range of 31–50 years, and 72.6% of the subjects were female. Furthermore, 73.8 and 73.0% of the individuals were married and educated for over 12 years, respectively. The DV increased by 37.5% during the quarantine period, compared to before the pandemic. The emotional type was the most common type of violence; the sexual type was the least frequent. Multivariate analysis indicated that infection with COVID-19, drug use, high level of co-living observation of anti-COVID prevention protocols, and lower level of physical activity during the quarantine period had a positive and significant association with the occurrence of DV. Conclusion Based on the obtained results, it is required to implement effective harm-reduction policies and measures in the community due to the increasing rate of DV during the COVID-19 epidemic.

To determine the role of electronic health (e-health) in the management of diabetes mellitus (DM), systematic review (SR) and metaanalysis (MA) studies were searched systematically. Eleven SR and six MA studies, including 533 sub-articles, were finally assessed. Six articles studied type 2, two studies assessed type 1, and five studies focused on both types of DM while four studies included type 1, type 2, and gestational DM. In total, 38641 patients with DM from all age groups were studied with a follow-up time from two phone calls to 60 months. As an intervention, short message service, multimedia messaging service, telemonitoring, glucometer applications, and personal digital assistant tools were studied. Nine out of 17 studies (53%) showed a significant reduction in HbA1c and eight (47%) studies revealed the inconclusive effect on it. However, the first group of studies was stronger and among interventions, text messaging as reminders was more effective. Conclusively, the majority of evidence shows the improvement of DM management by using e-health. However, a fragile acceptance toward this issue existed. Therefore, future research should focus more on using standard tools for the assessment of e-health efficacy, patients' views, health care providers' opinions, and cost-effectiveness of such interventions in long term.