Coronavirus Disease-19: Correlation between Knowledge and Preventive Behavior by Medical Students after One Year of Pandemic and Factors that Affect Knowledge

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic, which started in December 2019, is still continuing to date (November 2021), and nobody knows how long it will remain. During this time, the world remains vigilant against the pandemic, causing new problems in various fields of life. At the same time, the public continues getting latest information about COVID-19. One and a half year is not a short time to continuously carry out COVID-19 preventive behavior, which in turn causes relaxation of COVID-19 preventive behavior. AIM: This study aims to determine the correlation between knowledge and COVID-19 preventive behavior after one year of pandemic among medical students and to find out factors that affect knowledge about COVID-19. METHODS: This is a descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study with 261 respondents collected from students of the Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara. Respondents' data was collected using an online questionnaire which had been tested for its validity and reliability. Distribution of sample size used proportionate stratified random sampling and simple random sampling. Data will be analyzed using chi-square. RESULTS: Of the 261 respondents analyzed, 247 respondents (94.7%) had good level of knowledge, 222 respondents (85.1%) had good level of preventive behavior, and the factors that influenced knowledge were the year of admission (p-value: 0.028) and family member with past confirmed case of COVID-19 (p-value: 0.011). The knowledge and preventive behavior relationship analysis showed p-value: 0.009 (PR = 4.864 [95% CI 1.587-14.909]). CONCLUSION: Even though the pandemic has lasted for more than 1year, medical students with good level of knowledge still carry out good preventive behavior showing a meaningful relationship between knowledge and preventive behavior. Level of knowledge is influenced by the year of admission and family member with past confirmed case of COVID-19.