JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of information about the coronavirus on the Internet. If the language used in the video message is not clear or understandable to deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people with a high school degree or less, they can create confusion and information gaps among DHH people during a health emergency.

Objective:

To gather a baseline of DHH people’s perceptions related to effectiveness of physical distancing (PD) and asymptomatic individuals.

Methods:

A cross-sectional study of COVID-19 (N=445). Items included questions pertaining to COVID-19 knowledge were administered to US deaf adults from April 17, 2020, to May 1, 2020 via a bilingual ASL/English online survey platform.

Results:

The sample consisted of 445 DHH adults aged 18 to 88 years old, with 74% identifying as White and 54% as female. About 88% of the sample felt they knew most or a lot about PD. This figure dropped to 73% for the effectiveness of PD in reducing the spread of coronavirus and 72% for the contagiousness of an infected person without symptoms. PD awareness along with education were significant predictors of PD effectiveness (adj OR for PD awareness=5.00; 95% CI: 2.09, 11.95; adj OR for education=1.89; 95% CI: 1.13, 3.16). In a separate model, education and PD effectiveness significantly predicted knowledge of asymptomatic individual. Race, gender, and age did not contribute to both models for PD effectiveness and knowledge of asymptomatic individual.

Conclusions:

This study results point to the strong connection between education and coronavirus-related knowledge. Therefore, the information that DHH organizations and public health agencies quickly disseminate information during emergencies and pandemics must be clear, contain adequate and reliable information, and are timely in concordance with other information being disseminated.