Global pandemic covid-19 disease transmission and prevention awareness among the health care students and professionals in eastern & north east regions of India

Author: 
Prof Manashi Sengupta, Mr. Ridon Laloo and Ms. Arunika Borah

Coronavirus are a large family of virus which may cause illness in animals and humans. In humans, several coronavirus are known to cause respiratory infections ranging from the common cold to more severe disease such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The most recently discovered coronavirus causes coronavirus disease Covid19 and it has a global pandemic outbreak from Dec, 2019.Health care workers are at the front line of any outbreak response and such are exposed to hazards that put them at risk of infection with an outbreak pathogen (in this case COVID-19).1 The awareness about the disease, its sign and symptoms, transmission, conservative treatment, preventive measures etc. should be known to the health care workers. Keeping this point in mind, investigators were interested to gather information from the health care students and working professionals related to awareness of the pandemic COVID-19. Objectives of the Study: • To collect the baseline information of the health care students and working professionals. • To assess the knowledge regarding Covid-19, its transmission, progression and prevention. Materials and Methods: A web based descriptive survey research design was used for the study to accomplish the objectives. As it was the lock down period the tool was distributed through the Google forms created for the research data collection. One hundred thirty four (134) health care professionals working in various organization of eastern and north eastern region of India participated in this study from the period of 15th April 2020 till 30 April, 2020. The tools used to collect the information from the participants are the demographic data to collect the back ground information and structured knowledge questionnaire (Total no. of items were 22) to collect the information about their knowledge on Covid-19. Results: The overall awareness among health care students and professionals were good and very good respectively. 87% (n=134) knew that the transmission occurred through contact and droplet air route which shows they have good knowledge. 84% could response correctly on the clinical symptoms of Covid 19 which also interprets that they have very good knowledge. Majority (60%, n=134)) of health care personnel responded that the individual with COVID -19 can transmit the virus to other individual after only having or developing fever which interprets they have average knowledge. 100% (n=134) responded that the hand hygiene is an important standard precaution for general infection prevention and control which is a very good knowledge score. 73% (n=134), (good knowledge score) responded that PCR is an important diagnostic tool used to diagnose SARS CoV-2.

Paper No: 
3203