Public knowledge of novel coronavirus diseases 2019: a web-based national survey

Abstract

Background Although the existing cases of COVID-19 in China have been reducing since late February 2020, the confirmed cases are surging abroad. Improving public knowledge regarding COVID-19 is critical to control the epidemic. The study aimed to determine the China’s public knowledge of COVID-19 and attitude towards the control measures.Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted in 48 hours, from 29 February 2020, 22:30 to 2 March 2020, 22:30, based on a self-administered web-based questionnaire. The survey was conducted on the WeChat network. Exponential non-discriminative snowball sampling were applied. The questionnaire was voluntarily submitted by WeChat users. The questionnaire covered the basic demographic information, public knowledge about epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19, psychological state, and attitude towards overall control measures. The primary outcome was the Chinese public knowledge regarding COVID-19 and the attitude towards the control measures and secondary outcome was psychological state of the public during this epidemic.Results The study included 10,905 participants and 10,399 valid questionnaires were included for analysis. Participants with tertiary education, younger age and healthcare workers had better overall knowledge compared with other participants (all P<0.05). About 91.9% of the participants believed in person-to-person transmission and 39.1% believed in animal-to-person transmission. No significant correlation between anxiety and regional number of existing cases was found, while participants in Hubei were more anxious than those in other regions. In general, 74.1% of participants acknowledged the effectiveness of overall control measures and it was negatively correlated with regional number of existing cases (r=-0.492, P=0.007).Conclusions In conclusion, the survey revealed that Chinese public had overall good knowledge regarding COVID-19 except for those indeterminate knowledge. With the dynamic change of global epidemic situation and more researches, further study would be conducted to explore the change of public knowledge and attitude about COVID-19 in the future.

Impact of COVID-19 First Wave on Psychological and Psychosocial Dimensions: A Systematic Review

“…The results of the articles reviewed regarding social support during COVID-19 emergency were analyzed. From these results, people seemed to benefit during the first wave of the pandemic from real-life and online social support [20,24,[54][55][56][57][58][59][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71]. For example, receiving COVID-19 prosocial acts (e.g., providing support to people concerned about the pandemic, making donations to charities or people in need, grocery shopping for individuals at risk, helping with household chores, and giving gifts) by others reduced anxiety symptoms [64], and increased belongingness and community attachment [64].…”

“…A research showed that participants found information through electronic media and TV (85.5%), social media (81.3%), family members (69.0%) and friends (68.7%). Media communications influenced attitudes founding a positive relationship between exposure to media and prejudice towards four different nationalities (i.e., Chinese, Italian, Hungarian and Mongolian populations), while at the same, time media exposure has been associated with lower anxiety levels [16,17,24,43].…”

“…Age: Age affected both knowledge about COVID-19 and preventive behaviors, with the younger people resulting in more acknowledged and adopting preventive behaviours than elders [24].…”

“…In particular, lower levels of education were associated with more fear of dying by COVID-19, perception of susceptibility to the infection and worse overall knowledge about the pandemic. Conspiracy theories were widely believed even among highly educated individuals, predicting science mistrust, unwillingness to adhere to public health measures and increased psychological distress [24,25,[45][46][47].…”

“…Table 1 shows the validated measures used to analyze "Beliefs" and "Media persuasion". About "Media persuasion", all articles [17,[19][20][21][22][23][24] used ad-hoc measures.…”