Current Awareness of COVID-19 among the residents of Kandy district: An online questionnaire-based survey study

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.