Knowledge, attitudes and practices and fear of COVID-19 among medical students in Serbia

Introduction: The outbreak of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 named COVID-19 has spread throughout the world. The number of registered cases is increasing and almost no country or territory worldwide has been without any COVID-19 patient. The aim of this study was to examine the level of knowledge on the SARS-COv-2 and COVID-19 among medical students and to explore the differences in attitudes, practices and fear of COVID-19 among students with sufficient and students with insufficient knowledge.

Methodology: The cross-sectional study among the 1,722 medical students was conducted through an online platform of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade. The instrument used was a questionnaire with sections on socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge, attitudes and practices towards COVID-19 and the Fear of COVID-19 scale.

Results: Total of 1576 (91.50%) students were in the sufficient knowledge group. The multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that there was a significant association between the sufficient knowledge on COVID-19 and female sex (OR = 1.70, 95% CI = 1.18-2.45), age (OR = 1.10, 95% CI = 1.02-1.18), considering the preventive measures enforced in Serbia as good (OR = 2.57, 95% CI = 1.18-5.56), wearing the surgical mask outside of the household in the past 14 days (OR = 1.87, 95% CI = 1.22-2.87) and score on Fear of COVID-19 scale (OR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.91-0.98).

Conclusions: Medical students showed good knowledge of COVID-19 and could be a part of the promotion of health education messages as a part of preventive measures.