The knowledge of COVID-19 treatments, behaviors, and attitudes of providing the information on COVID-19 treatments: Perspectives of pharmacy students

BACKGROUND: Increasing community awareness about the transmission and treatment of COVID-19 will stop the spread of the virus. Pharmacy students are the potential facilitator to give community education about COVID-19 treatment. The objective of this study is to evaluate the pharmacy students’ knowledge of COVID-19 treatment, behavior, and attitude of providing the information about COVID-19 treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted cross-sectional study, recruiting 429 pharmacy students from three schools of pharmacy in Indonesia. The questionnaire about the knowledge of COVID-19 treatment, behavior, and attitude of providing the information on COVID-19 treatment met the validity and reliability criteria. We defined the proportion of knowledge, behavior, and attitude of the students using SPSS(®) version 22. RESULTS: Most of the students are in the earlier years (46.63%), female (84.15%), find the information about COVID-19 from many sources of media (85.08%) including scientific articles and know information about COVID-19 transmission around their life area (76.46%). The students’ knowledge about antiviral and plasma convalescent is good (>70%), the positive behaviors are related to the COVID-19 treatment information regarding to the antiviral and the provision of Vitamin C (>50%), and the positive attitude are related to giving information about the use of avigan®, plasma convalescent, chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, and immunomodulator (>50%). CONCLUSIONS: As a future pharmacist, the knowledge of pharmacy students about COVID-19 treatment needs to be improved since earlier years. Furthermore, using the good knowledge about COVID-19 treatment, the positive behavior and attitude of providing information of the students, the community behavior and attitude will be improved. The high year students have a tendency for the good knowledge and positive behavior and attitude of providing the information.