Abstract:
Background: With the difficulties of curbing its spread through the usual system, the COVID-19
virus has spread around the world and caused substantial impact. Thus, following the declaration
of the pandemic nations around the world including Ethiopia had set up preparedness and response
coordination mechanisms and performed different activities with the objective of maximally
suppress the communitywide transmission of the virus and its effect on the health system. Besides
the nobility of the virus we had limited experience in dealing with such kind of outbreak so
exploring the challenges and providing an insight that has the potential to inform the response
operations was worth noting.
Study Objective: The objective was to explore experienced challenges of the COVID-19
pandemic operational responses among members of the taskforces operating at different levels of
the response structure of Ethiopia during the early period of the pandemic.
Methods: A Qualitative research approach was employed among purposively selected members
of the response taskforces of five regions including Oromia, Amhara, SNNPR, Afar and Sidama
and two city administrations, Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa city administrations of Ethiopia from
June to September 2020. The data were collected through in-depth interviews which were
immediately transcribed followed by open coding for category and theme development, in which
facilitated by ATLAS.ti 7.5., qualitative analysis software. The findings presented systematically
by stating each theme with the support of the evidences of direct quotes. The study was ethically
approved by the IRB of Jimma University.
Result and Discussion: The study summarized the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic
operational responses into three main themes and related categories including, public/community
related challenges such as adherence to the PHSMs; challenges related to the frontline responders
such as engagement of fearful health work forces; and challenges related to response coordinators
such as coordinating the response between and within the response teams, collaborating
stakeholders and coordinating the response between adjacent/neighboring regions/woredas.
Conclusion and recommendation: Hence, this study provided an insight that has the potential to
inform the COVID-19 response operations targeting the members of the taskforces operating at
different levels of the response structure of Ethiopia and concluded that the challenges were
interrelated with complex interactions and relationships that could have potentially affected
IV
making the overall response operations more impacting to minimize community wide
transmission of the virus. However given the nobility and changing nature of the virus further
researches was required to reach a comprehensive and much better conclusion.
