Original Research Article
Year: 2020 | Month: April-June | Volume: 5 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 432-443
Awareness, Attitude and Practices towards COVID-19 among People of Bihar during Lockdown 1.0: A Cross-Sectional Study
Shiba Singh1, Ranjan Kumar Singh2
1Junior Research Fellow, 2Doctoral Fellow- ICSSR,
Department of Teacher Education, SOE, Central University of South Bihar, Gaya
Corresponding Author: Shiba Singh
ABSTRACT
The whole world is confronting with emerging pandemic Covid-19 infectious disease, prior to India this pandemic has been apocalyptic impact across the world since first case was detected in Wuhan City of China. In order to control the rapid spread of this infectious disease, unprecedented public health measures such as sanitation, social distancing and lockdown is adopted in country. Compliances of these public health measures absolutely depend on people’s awareness, attitude and practices (AAP) towards Covid-19. This study is an attempt to survey the people of Bihar and to understand their awareness level, attitude and practices towards covid-19 during lockdown 1.0 (the initial phase of covid-19 outbreak).In this study researcher conducted a online survey via author’s networks with people of Bihar, India among different age group people mostly young people which comprises largest population of India, sampled from an existing prospective cohort study with a total sample size of 250(n=250). The online survey questionnaire(AAP) was developed by the researcher on three dimension i.e., Awareness (associated with clinical symptoms, transmission routes and precautionary measures), Attitude (question associated with had confidence that India will successfully win the fight against covid-19, falling stress or bore and how they view the situation) and Practices (question regarding following social distancing & government guidelines and where they spending most of their time) which comprising 10, 4, and 3 questions of Awareness, Attitude and practices, respectively. Baseline was conducted from March 29 to April 14 2020; subsequent iterations of the survey are planned to be conducted on a monthly basis. Among the total participants n=250 60.8% were male, 89.6% belong to age group 17-35, 73.2% were never married, 54.8% held master degree & above, 54% were students and 38.4% currently living in city. The overall correct response rate on awareness question is 80.2%. There is no statistically significant difference found among participants’ awareness level on the basis of their demographic characteristics. The majority of 78% respondents had confidence that India can win the battle against covid-19, 53.6% participant stated that they are not feeling stress as 96% respondents view this pandemic situation as a challenger. 99.6% respondents admitted that they are following social distancing and government guidelines. 34% respondents spending their most of time with family while 22%, 16.4%, 12%, 5.2%, 10.4% respondents spending most of their time on work from home, health and hygiene, social networking sites, turned on their old hobbies and other respectively. Most of people had sanguine attitude and using pertinent practices towards covid-19. Health and family welfare organizations are working towards covid-19 awareness and appropriate behavior for reducing the spread of infection. As we did not found adequate sample representation of population aged: below 16 and 60+; therefore we should be careful while generalizing the findings of this study to the above mentioned age group of people.
Keywords: Pandemic, Public health measures, Awareness, Attitude, Practices, Covid-19, Bihar.