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

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. 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. 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. 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.