key: cord-0711427-q7egnpaq authors: Singh, Ashish Kumar; Agrawal, Bharti; Sharma, Anukriti; Sharma, Prayas title: COVID‐19: Assessment of knowledge and awareness in Indian society date: 2020-08-27 journal: J Public Aff DOI: 10.1002/pa.2354 sha: 3376a13f79f3b2d0128b7a305c3a58ff94cf143b doc_id: 711427 cord_uid: q7egnpaq 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. 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. 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 2020c). 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 COVID-19 (WHO, 2020c) . On the counterpart, our Indian government is also making aware of the people by disseminating information through various reliable sources and providing medical facilities and trying to reduce the losses due to coronavirus. But, in India, we have a very huge dense population without well-established medical facilities, which is a matter of concern Sohrabi et al. There is very little research in India covering the above factors, so this study is crucial for planning and adopting the preventive measures by public and government officials during this pandemic. Hence, this study will help in future to design necessary strategies in Indian society to fight against viruses. Our study was cross-sectional, carried out by a convenience, nonprobability sampling technique in India. We adopted this sampling because, due to movement constraints during a lockdown, it was impossible to approach a common man in the population. This technique of convenience sampling, which is a nonprobability sampling technique, allows researchers to select respondents directly from the population as per their convenience. This technique was costeffective and time-saving. Researchers choose these samples just because they are easy to fix, approach and train. A semistructured questionnaire was developed in straightforward, understandable English by using Google form. The questionnaire was disseminated to known through WhatsApp, e-mails and other social media platforms. The participants showed enough interest in giving their responses and forwarded it to their contacts, which resulted in getting responses from all over the country. Participants who possess smartphones with internet connectivity have participated in this study, which is very common in modern society. Participants above 15 years and comfortable in English filled the response with willingness. Total, we received 533 responses, but some were filled incomplete, so we eliminated them. Finally, we analyzed 522 responses to draw our results. The respondents' sociodemographic profile was accessed by a questionnaire, which includes gender, age, education, place of residence, domicile, marital status and so forth. The questionnaire used for the survey have a separate section to know how they commute and interact to peoples, what are their trusted source of information, two questions were to evaluate the threat level of virus, one dichotomous question for awareness about health facility, six questions to estimate awareness level of coronavirus in society, 11 questions for accessing symptoms, 12 questions for perception about prevention from coronavirus. The process of data collection was held from April 11, 2020 to April 28, 2020. Factor analysis with principal component analysis was used to describe the unobserved underlying latent variables with 12 observed variables (items) of prevention methods adopted by people for coronavirus. Bartlett's test of sphericity was used to check interdependency among the items and KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy) was used to inspect the sample sufficiency (Kaiser, 1974) . The criterion of Eigenvalue > 1 with factor loading greater than 0.5 was used to decide the number of factors (latent variables; Kaiser, 1960 , Sharma, 1996 , Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black, 1995 . To check the items' internal consistency (reliability index), Cronbach's α (Cronbach, 1984) value was calculated and checked. This study presents the key findings from a total of 522 respondents (Table 1) This study depicts that the respondents belong to 23 states of our country with maximum representation (193) from Uttar Pradesh, followed by Madhya Pradesh 116 and Uttarakhand 45. When people were asked about how they commute, the overall result precipitate that a majority of the respondents 227 (44%) commute by two wheelers, which are open to threat of getting infections, 74 (14%) use their personal cars, so they can manage hygiene factors, 54 (10%) use bus, which are prone to maximum exposure, 48 (9%) uses college bus. Thus, we can say that in society, most of the respondents are having the threat of getting exposed for infection (Figure 3 ). On the result of question asking regarding the numbers of people they generally interact and do you walk through crowded place daily?, finding of the study indicates that out of total, 199 (38%) respondents reported that they daily interact with more than On the question about whether respondents are preventing from virus, out of the total participants, 515 (98.6%) admit that social distancing is crucial to finish virus from transmission. However, 505 (96.7%) admitted washing hands during certain period of time and 510 (97%) felt the need of wearing mask. Almost 501 (96%) agreed that they should avoid face to face meeting (Table 4) . The investigators applied the factor analysis using principal component analysis as extraction method, with varimax rotation to describe the underlying unobserved latent variables of respondent's perception for methods to prevent from COVID-19. The objective of factor analysis was to know that what are the major ways through which people's were preventing themselves from virus Table 5 . The KMO measure was 0.834 > 0.5 (as recommended value of 0.5; Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007) . In addition to this, Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant (χ2 [66] = 1,965.169, p = .000) ( Table 6 ). In addition, the sample size 522 is more than 10 times the number of variables 12 (Kaiser, 1974) , considering N:p ratio to be at least 10, where N is sample size and p is number of variable to be analyzed. All these above results show that factor analysis is suitable and useful for our data. All the items are standardized to ensure the proper interpretation on a common scale. Scree plots and Eigen values were used to extract the suitable number of factor solutions. Three latent factors were fixed after the analysis of Kaiser normalization criteria (Pett, Lackey, & Sullivan, 2003) and scree plots (Baldridge & Veiga, 2001; Balser, 2007; Balser & Harris, 2008; Cleveland, Barnes-Farrell, & Ratz, 1997; Colella, 2001; Stone & Colella, 1996) . These factors are labeled as latent variables F1: follow the lockdown, combination of (avoid travelling by any medium, avoid going to market, avoid morning walk, avoid going to office), F2: naturopathy, is a combination of (exercise and yoga, eating ginger, garlic, chilies, drinking warm water, avoid going to cold weather) and F3: social distancing is combination of (avoid face to face meeting, wash hand and face regularly, wear mask and sanitize, social distancing) and loadings of all about items were greater than 0.5, explaining 34.59%, 14.07% and 10.94% of the variances, respectively. The total variance explained by three factors is 59.16%. Table 6 describes each of the three factors and their factor loading. We also conducted reliability test of the selected 12 factors to test how well they measures what they are intended to measure. How reliable they are to measure latent variable, that is, perception to prevent from virus?, value of Cronbach's alpha (α) for above is 0.812 (Table 5) , which is good enough to meet the purpose. This study also has some limitations such as questionnaires filled by people who can understand English and possess smartphones with internet connectivity. These educated population segments are mainly will also get an idea of common man psychology, problems and worries of ordinary people to formulate a better and effective strategy. COVID-19 battle during the toughest sanctions against Iran. The Lancet How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic? Toward a great understanding of the willingness to request an accommodation: Can requesters' beliefs disable the Americans with disabilities act? 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