Knowledge toward COVID-19 Pandemic during Panic Period Among Communities of Arsi Zone, Southeast Ethiopia

Introduction: The world faces the greatest socio-economic shock in a generation, coming at a time of acute inequality, ecological fragility and growing distrust within and amongst societies due to Corona virus disease 19, which has health as well as humanitarian and development crisis that is threatening to leave deep social, economic and political scars for years to come, particularly in countries found in fragility, poverty and conflict. Objectives: The overall objective of this study was to assess level of knowledge and factors associated toward COVID 19 among residents in Arsi Zone, South East Ethiopia.Methods: A community based cross-sectional study was conducted among Data entry and cleaning was done using Epi Info version 3.5.4 and exported to SPSS version 22 for analysis. Descriptive statistics was used to depict frequency, mean and percentages of the characteristics. Logistic regression was run to see significant predictors of knowledge and 95% CI at p-value <0.05 were used declare significant association. Results: About 54.1% of the respondents had good knowledge about COVID 19. Being government employee AOR 3.37 95% CI (1.16, 9.79) and income> 2000 birr AOR 2.8 95% CI (1.33, 5.90) were significantly associated with having good knowledge about COVID 19. Conclusions: Low socio-economic status was more likely to be related with low earning which might limit access to information regarding COVID 19. Hence, targeting information dissemination about COVID 19 to low income societies might improve the level of knowledge about COVID 19.