Knowledge and anxiety about COVID-19 in the State of Qatar, and the Middle East and North Africa Region—A Cross Sectional Study

• Main Authors: DORAISWAMY, Sathyanarayanan, CHEEMA, Sohaila, MAISONNEUVE Patrick, ABRAHAM, Amit, WEBER, Ingmar, AN, Jisun, LOWENFELS, Albert B., MAMTANI, Ravinder
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: COVID-19; health information; misinformation; anxiety; knowledge; Databases and Information Systems; Health Information Technology; Public Health
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6767; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7770/viewcontent/ijerph_18_06439_v3.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

While the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, we have witnessed substantial mis- and disinformation regarding various aspects of the disease. We conducted a cross-sectional study using a self-administered questionnaire for the general public (recruited via social media) and healthcare workers (recruited via email) from the State of Qatar, and the Middle East and North Africa region to understand the knowledge of and anxiety levels around COVID-19 (April–June 2020) during the early stage of the pandemic. The final dataset used for the analysis comprised of 1658 questionnaires (53.0% of 3129 received questionnaires; 1337 [80.6%] from the general public survey and 321 [19.4%] from the healthcare survey). Knowledge about COVID-19 was significantly different across the two survey populations, with a much higher proportion of healthcare workers possessing better COVID-19 knowledge than the general public (62.9% vs. 30.0%, p