Abstract:
Awareness and knowledge of the COVID-19 health guidelines (HGs)
ascended when the death rates started to spike. Yet, the general public seems
to have relaxed COVID-19 HGs with the reduction of daily deaths. This
questionnaire was conducted to determine the knowledge, opinions, and
current (October 2022) awareness of COVID-19 HGs among the residents of
the Kandy district. The aim of this research is to minimize the health impact
by keeping people aware. It was first piloted among a selected group to
validate the questionnaire. The IBM statistics SPSS was used to conduct the
Chi-square analysis. A total of 100 responses were received, and the analyzing
process was done by using a scoring method. Sixteen were considered as
incomplete responses. The collected data for the study indicated that more than
half of the population (63.3%) were undergraduate students. Among the
respondents 60%, 30% and 10% are still following, not following and
occasionally following the government COVID-19 HGs, respectively. The
majority of the respondents (31%) stay informed about COVID-19 HGs using
social media while 24% of respondents relied on television. In our study, a
significantly higher number of females were found to be more likely to follow
HGs (χ2 = 9.177, p = 0.01). Yet, there was no significant difference between
the male and female populations who were currently adhering to HGs (χ2 =
5.88, p = 0.05). Among the total population considered, 47.3% believed that
the COVID-19 pandemic is over and ignored.
