COVID-19Awareness, Perceptions and Myths Among General Population of Pakistan During Pandemic. A survey-based study

Abstract

A novel corona virus has emerged as a disastrous situation globally. Along with a huge number of mortalities, corona virus pandemic has brought with it, the socioeconomical downfall. People around the world went through a tough physical and mental state. Initially, it was hard to establish an effective elimination strategy due to the unavailability of authentic knowledge about the transmission and treatment of the disease. However, it was defined by the World Health Organization that social distancing could be the key step to reduce the spread of disease. Pakistan during the first outbreak was listed among the less effected countries as per statistics. Therefore, a survey-based study was designed to evaluate the level of awareness about COVID-19 among the general population of Pakistan and their beliefs and attitude towards the preventive measure. Out of 376 respondents,46.28% of Pakistanis exhibited excellent and good levels of knowledge, followed by 6.91% fair, only 0.53% of individuals were found to have poor knowledge about COVID-19. No remarkable statistical difference was noted among different socio-demographic variables like age, gender, qualification, and profession. It was concluded that the awareness could be the reason behind the less or controlled spread of COVID-19 in Pakistan during the first outbreak of 2020 as compared to other countries around.