Exploring the challenges and experience of the COVID-19 pandemic responses during the early periods of the pandemic in Ethiopia: A qualitative study

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.