Awareness, perceptions, and preventive practices of COVID-19 among health workers in Tigray, North Ethiopia

Background: Despite measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the world, it is increasing day by day. Countries that implement good prevention strategies are less likely to be infected with COVID-19 than those that do not. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess knowledge, attitude, and preventive practices toward COVID-19 early in the outbreak among health workers in Northern Ethiopia. Methods: A health facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted among health professionals working in public health centers and hospitals from April to May 2020. A simple random sampling technique was employed to select study respondents. Data were entered in Epi-info 7.1 and exported to SPSS version 20.00 for analysis. Simple descriptive summary statistics were done. Binary logistic regression was used to evaluate the factors of the principal defense practice. Results: A total of 403 health workers were included in the study making a response rate of 96%. Of these, 79% and 87.9% of health care workers had good knowledge and a good attitude and 64.3% of health care practitioners had good practice in preventing COVID-19. Approximately 92.0% said that COVID-19 has no specific treatment and vaccine, while 54.8% of health care workers did not use the necessary personal protective equipment at all times. We found that being female [AOR 2.43, 95% CI (1.50–3.94)], work experience of 2–5 years [AOR 2.44, 95% CI (1.10–5.39)], news media as a source of information [AOR 7.11, 95% CI (3.07–16.49)], social media as a source of information [AOR 4.59, 95% CI (2.15–9.84)], and governmental website as a source of information [AOR 4.21, 95% CI (2.15–8.27)] were reported as protective factors, and being single marital status [AOR 0.15, 95% CI (0.03–0.75)] was reported as a risk factor toward the prevention of COVID-19. Conclusion: Most health workers scored good knowledge and attitude; nevertheless, a significant proportion of health workers had poor practice toward the prevention of COVID-19, including the use of PPE. Additionally, some groups of health professional had poor practices of implementing the public health measures, thus necessitating a call targeted at them to improve the prevention and control of COVID-19.