Face Mask Habits and COVID-19 Among University Students in Cairo

Face Mask Habits and COVID-19: A Cross-Sectional Study of University Students During the Third Wave in Greater Cairo

The World Health Organization officially declared the pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as a public health emergency. The virus can remain viable in aerosol form for approximately three hours before being inhaled. Face masks have become an essential component of the ensuing fight against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).Therefore, a multicenter cross-sectional study was conducted during the pandemic to investigate university students' face mask habits in Greater Cairo, Egypt.

Study design and participants:

This cross-sectional study is going to be carried out at a time when wearing masks in public places, transportation and universities is mandatory. The questionnaire which is designed to collect the data is targeted to college students who are attending universities in Greater Cairo, Egypt. The questionnaire will be left open for a duration of 10 days to collect the required responses.

Data collection:

The data is going to be collected from a questionnaire that we created using Google forms, consisting of 33 questions. It was written in English then translated to Arabic to be understandable to as many people as possible. The survey will be sent using a snowball sampling method to the participants through various social media applications such as: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Telegram. A pilot study of the questionnaire will be pre-tested on a small sample of participants to confirm the practicability and clarity of questions to check content and face validity. In addition, the reliability will be determined by calculating Cronbach alpha. Observations of the pilot study will not be included in the final analysis.

Statistical analysis:

Dichotomous data will be expressed by numbers and frequency. Continuous variables will be expressed by means and standard deviation if within the normal distribution. Range and interquartile range will be used to express continuous data within the non-normal distribution. Data will be exported to an excel sheet from Google forms and will be analyzed by an expert using IBM SPSS Statistics program.

Inclusion Criteria:

• The target population was limited to individuals aged 18 to 28 years, as those individuals can provide consent and represent the undergraduate and graduate sections.
• The participants were asked about the location of their campuses to ensure that their responses were limited only to the universities in Greater Cairo.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Individuals below the age of 18 years old are not old enough to provide consent, and individuals above the age of 28 are considered postgraduate.
• To make sure that responses arrived only from Greater Cairo universities, a question asking about the location of university campus is added to exclude responses from outside the specified area which only includes the cities of Cairo, Giza, Helwan (15th of May), Shubra El Kheima, 6th of October, Sheikh Zayed City, Badr, New Cairo (including Rehab and Fifth Settlement), New Heliopolis, Obour, Shorouk, Madinaty21.