Abstract:

COVID-19 due to its rapid spread through different countries, in March 2020, was recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. However, as of March 2021, globally more than 119 million were diagnosed and more than 2.6 million people died from this disease. Health sciences students constitute the potential human capital that will face the care of people with emerging diseases such as COVID-19; therefore, research on attitudes about preventive measures is of vital importance. Recent studies reported that university students present favorable perceptions towards preventive measures; while another study indicated that they have a high perception of risk of COVID-19; however, other reports indicate that they do not believe that preventive measures can protect them from the disease. These differences reflect the need to analyze perceptions in different contexts. The objective of the study was to determine the factors associated with perceptions of COVID-19 preventive measures that health students have during a quarantine in Peru.

An observational correlational study was carried out using a Likert-type scale, managed through Google Forms, during August and September 2020. The population was 2569 health sciences students, the sample calculated was 777 Nursing and Human Medicine students from three universities in Peru, a non- probabilistic snowball sampling was used. The reliability of the scale was determined by Cronbach's alpha (0.8735). To determine the differences in the score of attitudes, for each variable it was used the tests: U of Mann Whitney and H of Kruskal Wallis, with Dunn's post-hoc comparison and Bonferroni's correction. In addition, a multivariate analysis was performed using Poisson regression. A significance level of 0.05 was considered The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

It was found that the mean of the perception score was 3.54 ± 0.3 and the differences observed between the perception according to the type of preventive measures were statistically significant. Likewise, the bivariate analysis reported statistically significant differences in the score of attitudes with sex, place of residence, having relatives with COVID-19 and type of university; however, the multivariate analysis only reported an association with the sex variable.

As conclusion, it can be pointed out that sex is a factor associated with perceptions towards COVID-19 prevention measures; being a woman would increase the perception score. Therefore, intervention programs should be designed to promote favorable attitudes for the prevention of COVID-19, especially aimed at men.

Keywords:

Coronavirus infections, students nurse, students medical, perceptions.