Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude, and Perception towards COVID-19 Vaccine among the General Population in the Hail Province, KSA

Abstract

Aim: Coronavirus infection has caused disease at the pandemic level with several deaths worldwide and affected all aspects of human life. One way to minimize virus transmission and its effects is to perform mass vaccination within the general population so that herd immunity is developed against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, low health literacy and vaccine hesitancy are potential threats in achieving this. The present study is designed to measure the Knowledge, Attitude, and Perception levels towards COVID-19 and assess public perception and acceptance levels of the vaccine among the general population in the Hail province of Saudi Arabia.
 Methods: A bilingual, community-based questionnaire, consisting of the respondents’ socio-demographic profile, COVID-19 knowledge, and attitude & perception towards COVID-19 vaccination, was circulated using different social media platforms. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS software.
 Results: Appropriate knowledge level was found in 74.8% of the respondents, whereas inappropriate knowledge levels were observed in females and participants with non-health-related occupations and were inversely related to willingness to the vaccine. More than 60% of the respondents had a negative attitude towards the COVID-19 vaccine, as only 51% were willing to get vaccinated. A negative attitude was significantly associated with female respondents.
 Conclusion: Our study reports a high knowledge level among the respondents in the Hail province. However, there is also a decreased willingness to be vaccinated, suggesting that more vaccine and health literacy seminars should be conducted to generate awareness among the general population in the Hail province, KSA.

Knowledge and Covid 19 Vaccine Uptake Among Elderly in Ogun State, Nigeria

“…Generally, the participants had low knowledge of the COVID 19 virus and vaccine. A similar finding was reported by Mohamed et al, in Malaysia and Enitan et al, in six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, where they reported poor knowledge about the COVID-19 vaccine (Mohamed et al, 2021;Enitan et al, 2020) However, this finding is at variance with the reports of Khaja et al, in Saudi Arabia, and Huynh et al, in Vietnam, where they reported adequate knowledge of COVID-19 Virus and vaccine among their participants (Khaja et al, 2021;Huynh et al, 2021) This difference in finding may be as a result of disparity in study location and population, also the effort of government and non-governmental agencies in the countries to ensure that the populace is well informed about COVID-19 virus.…”