Awareness of covid-19. speech in English
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Journal of Public Affairs
Wiley-Blackwell
COVID‐19: Assessment of knowledge and awareness in Indian society
Ashish Kumar Singh, Bharti Agrawal, [...], and Prayas Sharma
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Abstract
COVID‐19, which was initiated regionally at Wuhan of China, has become a global pandemic by infecting people of almost all the world. Human civilizations are facing threat for their survival and livelihood. No country are getting any substantial relief and solution from this pandemic rather to convince their citizens to make aware and taking precaution by changing their living style. In view of this, this study attempted to assess the awareness, threat, symptoms and its prevention among people of India about the COVID‐19. A total of 522 responses from all over India were received. The respondents have adequate awareness for COVID‐19 outbreak and its preventive measures, out of total, 98% (513) answered that the virus spreads from one person to another, 95% (494) answered that the disease is caused by a virus. Peoples understand the importance of social distancing and other preventive measures prescribed by the government with good attitude for coronavirus. Peoples are following trusted sources for corona information, having confidence to defeat disease but showed their concern for corona threat, are aware about the virus, its common symptoms and prevention, govt. testing and medical facilities. Principal component analysis was used to identify the latent dimensions regarding people's preventive measures and was found that they are majorly adopting three methods, that is, lockdown, naturopathy and social distancing. This study will help government and peoples to understand and handle this coronavirus pandemic effectively and in prevention of COVID‐19, which is crucial for the awareness of society in coming time.
1. INTRODUCTION
COVID‐19 started from one city of China in December 2019, but in a short span of time, it covered almost all over the world (WHO, 2020b). Nearly 216 countries of the whole world are struggling for their civilization and livelihood against the coronavirus pandemic. On January 11, 2020, China declared first death of their 61 years old citizen due to COVID‐19, who was exposed to the seafood market (WHO, 2020b), but now death reached exponentially to 357,736 on 29th May 2020 (WHO, 2020a).
On February 11, 2020, WHO announced this coronavirus disease as COVID‐19 (WHO, 2020c) and pandemic on March 11, 2020, after reaching the virus infection to 114 countries across the world.
COVID‐19 and SARS coronavirus are similar and because it is becoming a big threat to human civilization as consequences, online awareness programs were initiated and conducted worldwide by WHO (2020c).
Proper strategies and funds were set up by WHO globally to protect the countries with special focus to poor and weaker health infrastructure developing countries. The aim was to reduce the virus communication in society, dissemination of crucial information, providing proper healthcare and to minimize social and economical loss. WHO also focused on establishing an easy and effective diagnostic system to prevent infection (WHO 2020 c).
To prevent the infection socially, the lockdown was imposed globally, which resulted in the halt of all economic and social activity in society. This led to cease global supply chains badly resulting in the global economy in bad shape (Ebrahim, Ahmed, Gozzer, Schlagenhauf, & Memish, 2020). In India, the Central Government also imposed a nationwide lockdown for the first time on March 22, 2020 and continued it up to till date, that is, on May 30, 2020. All transport, manufacturing, hotel industry, educational sector, service industry and so forth were closed immediately, people were left to remain as to where they were at the time of lockdown announcement and during lockdown people started working from home, school and colleges classes are running online, a large number of people shifted on a digital platform (McCloskey et al., 2020).
But on May 30, 2020, this situation of coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) outbreak has become worse, as it contains 5,704,736 confirmed cases, 357,736 confirmed deaths across 216 countries. India also has 165,799 confirmed cases with 4,706 casualties (WHO, 2020d).
India braces for the COVID-19 pandemic; healthcare workers on the frontlines are particularly vulnerable to this infection. The virus that causes COVID -19 was initially called as 2019-nCoV and was then termed as syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) [1]. It is a new strain discovered in 2019 which was not found previously in humans.
Previously, the severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV) have been known to affect humans. Outbreaks of respiratory disease caused by these viruses seem to have originated in animals before moving into other hosts like humans. MERS-CoV was found to be transmitted from Arabian camels to humans, whereas SARS-CoV was transmitted from civet cats to humans. SARS-CoV-2 seems to have originated from bats and first reports of cases were from Wuhan, Hubei Province in China, suggesting an animal-to-person spread from a live animal market. The virus then spread outside Hubei and subsequently, to the rest of the world via human transmission. Several countries have now reported community spread. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus disease as a pandemic on March 11, 2020 [2].
With this mode of transmission, healthcare workers are among the highest risk of being infected. The highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus is an additional hazard for the healthcare system apart from the burden of extended work hours, physical and psychological stress, burnout, and fatigue [3]. The objective of this study is to assess the awareness of COVID-19 disease and its related infection control practices among healthcare professionals in the Indian healthcare scenario. This was a questionnaire-bas.