Introduction. Unfortunately, Covid-19 is quickly transmitted from person to person and due to the unexpected outburst, many of its manifestations remain unknown. Also, due to the ambiguity of virus’s behavior, there is a lot of confusion and disagreement about itself, its spreading, and about the precautions that must be taken to prevent the infection. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the level of performance knowledge and attitude towards Covid-19 in the Iranian population. Materials and methods. Our study is descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional. The population under study is Iranian one. Researchers designed a questionnaire based on other studies and distributed it via email, WhatsApp, as well as manually, in south and southeastern Iran. The questionnaire included two sections: demographic characteristics and KAP measurement questions. The demographic variables included age, gender, marital status, education, and occupation. The questionnaire had 41 questions: 5 on general information, 24 on knowledge, 6 on attitude and 6 on practice. Score 2 belonged to the correct answer, the score 0 to incorrect answer and don’t know. We evaluated knowledge, attitude and performance scores of individuals according to the demographic characteristics t-test, ANOVA and chi-square test. Data analysis was performed with SPSS21 version. The significance level P <0.05 was considered in all studies. Results and discussion. In this investigation, we distributed 8,251 questionnaires, out of which 7,802 cases were examined (response rate=94.5%) – 4,350 women and 3,482 men. The mean age of participants was 33.2±11.5. The main source of information was internet and WhatsApp, followed by television, newspaper and friends and acquaintances. The mean and SD of knowledge was 28.3±4.1. The sufficient knowledge of participants was 87.1%. This study showed that the average score of awareness has a significant relationship with gender (P=0.001), job (P=0.002) and level of education (P=0.001). The mean and SD of attitude was 20.2±3.5. Among all participants, 6,998 (89.7%) had a good attitude. There was a significant relationship between positive attitude and gender (P=0.01), level of education (P=0.01) and job (P=0.04). The average score of practice was 8.1±2.1 and 5,214 (66.8%) had sufficient practice. This study shows a significant relationship practice with age (P=0.01), job (P=0.01) and level of education (P=0.001). Conclusion. An acceptable number of participants had good knowledge and attitude toward Covid-19, but they shown a poor performance in wearing masks and gloves and in avoiding parties and crowded places.
Keywords:- ATTITUDES
- coronavirus
- covid-19
- KNOWLEDGE
- practices