Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) Assessment on LifeStyle, Public Health Measures Practiced by Society and Their Impact to Contain COVID-19 Transmission Among Afar Community in Selected Parts of Afar Region, Ethiopia

INTRODUCTION: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, RNA family. It has continued to spread across the world after its first outbreak in China in 2019. On 11 March 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic given its global public health and economic impacts. OBJECTIVE: To assess knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) on lifestyle, public health measures practiced by society and their impact to contain COVID-19 transmission in the Afar community, Afar Region, Ethiopia. METHODS: Community-based cross-sectional study design was conducted from May to July, 2020, on purposively selected districts and the Peasant Association (PA). Simple random sampling was applied to select households and study participants. Structured and semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect information from study participants. The collected data were entered into Microsoft Excel and transferred to SPSS version 20 for analysis. Both descriptive and analytical analysis was provided and a p-value of less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. RESULTS: Of the total (266) study participants, most of them had no formal education (61.7%) and were aged from 35–40 (34.2%). More than half, 67.7% and 56.8%, of participants did not know chewing chat and smoking cigarettes as a risk factor for COVID-19, respectively. Almost half, 49.6%, of participants live in a house which is non-partitioned and without ventilation. The participants were took part in public gatherings such as funerals (27.1%), weddings (13.9%), meetings (13.5%) and went to a market (9%) during the pandemic. Nearly half (47.7%) of the study participants did not wear facemasks. Of the total, 27.4% and 71.4% participants lost their daily income more than and less than half, respectively. CONCLUSION: This study revealed knowledge, attitude and practice of the community in the area to contain COVID-19 spread were minimal. Therefore, more improvement of public health measures will be required.