Authors: Adeyemo Florence O, Okpala Pat U, Olajide Adetunmise Oluseyi, Fawole Isreai Opeyemi.
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. Nigeria has taken preventive and precautionary measures to control its spread. The knowledge and attitude of people towards covid-19 infections will determine their level of adherence. This study therefore determines the knowledge and attitude of people living in Ogbomoso towards COVID-19 infection. Descriptive design was used for this study
and the target population includes all men and women between ages 19 and above living in Ogbomoso. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 520 participants A self-structured questionnaire with five sections was developed. The Content, construct and face validity was ensured and reliability was also established by using Cronbach alfa with a co-efficient score of 0.87. The data were entered using Epidata software (version 3.1) and exported into statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) 25.0 version for analysis. Descriptive statistics like percentages, frequencies, means and standard deviation were computed. Relationships between variables were determined using bivariate and multivariate logistic regression. The findings of this study observed that participants level of knowledge about COVID-19 was high and the source of information are friends, radio, television and relatives. Further findings revealed that the attitude of the participants was positive and the major factors influencing the participants’ attitude towards COVID-19 are; educational background, awareness-raising by health workers and psycho-social support. Two hypotheses were tested and the result showed that only educational status has significant relationship with attitude of respondents towards COVID-19 and there was no significant association between knowledge of participants and their attitude towards COVID-19. It was therefore recommended that government should take tight actions, control and precautionary measures against COVID-19, to safeguard citizens and ensure their well-being, this will increase positive attitudes of the community.