Discussion
COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia as other countries around the globe is considered one of the most challenging threats to national public health. Since there is no vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, awareness about it is crucial for preventing the spread of this pandemic. Therefore, the main goal of the current study was to assess the level of awareness, health seeking behaviors and preventive measures towards COVID-19. The findings reveal that, although some variability was noted in knowledge in regard to COVID-19 causes, symptoms and route of transmission. 72.51% of the participants in the current study have good knowledge and they correctly identified the causes, symptoms and route of transmission of the disease.
The high level of awareness among our university students could be due to the effectiveness of different awareness campaigns that were conducted by Saudi Ministry of Health around the country beside the abundant information that available in social media. This finding was in accordance with what had been reported by Pranav et al. who concluded that 71.2% of their studied students in Mumbai (India) were reporting correct answers regarding the awareness about COVID-1918. Although, it is a bit less than what had been reported by Alzoubi et al who stated that the level of awareness about symptoms of COVID-19 among their studied sample in Jordan which was more than 90%19.
In contrast our obtained result regarding awareness is higher than what had been concluded by by Rhea et al in India (48%) and also higher than what had been reported by Chesser et al in USA at Wichita State University which was only 18% of their sample identified the symptoms correctly20,21.
The possible explanation of the differences between these results could because the data collection processes performed by different measurement instruments as well as the different sample sizes and different populations with different cultures.
In regard to source of information for the students about COVID-19 issues, the majority of the participants in the current study 51% cited that social media was their main source. Interestingly, this obtained result support the evidences published in numerous of studies, indicating that the most cited source of getting information regarding COVID-19 was the social media22,23,18. This could be due to the fact that this age generations are called techno-generation in most countries.
In terms of health seeking behaviors, our study concluded that 556(81.3%) of our studied participants believe that they should wear face mask when leaving their homes. The highest percentage of positive responses were significantly noticed among medical students. The findings of the current study in this specific matter are similar to those from other studies that conducted in India, Jordan and China18,19,24. Additionally, college affiliation was significantly has an impact on the total knowledge and behavior scores among the students which was high among those at medical colleges.