Jan Keller, Stephan U Dombrowski, Jinjin Ma, Silvia Caterina Maria Tomaino, Sabrina Cipolletta, Karen Morgan, Adriana Baban, Hodaya Wolf, Yiqun Gan, William Peraud, Noa Vilchinsky, Margarida Gaspar de Matos, Ralf Schwarzer, Ebrima Danso, Kamil Szymanski, Konstantin Schenkel, Maria Siwa, Urte Scholz, Vishna Shah, Bruno Quintard, Mohammad Abdul Awal Miah, Nina Knoll, Aleksandra Luszczynska, Sydney Brooks, Diana Taut, Tania Gaspar, Michelle I. Jongenelis, Zofia Szczuka, Charles Abraham, Konstadina Griva, Uniwersytet Wroclawski, Deakin University [Melbourne, Australia] (DU), Babes-Bolyai University [Cluj-Napoca] (UBB), University of New Brunswick (UNB), Universita degli Studi di Padova, Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia (MRC), Peking University [Beijing], Universidade de Lisboa (ULISBOA), Nanyang Technological University [Singapour], University of Melbourne, Freie Universität Berlin, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland School of Medicine [Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia] (RCSISM), Perdana University [Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia] (PU), Bordeaux population health (BPH), Université de Bordeaux (UB)-Institut de Santé Publique, d'Épidémiologie et de Développement (ISPED)-Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Universität Zürich [Zürich] = University of Zurich (UZH), Bar-Ilan University [Israël], University of Zurich, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), Malbec, Odile, Università degli Studi di Padova = University of Padua (Unipd), Universidade de Lisboa = University of Lisbon (ULISBOA), and Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
© The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data., Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's engagement in health behaviors, especially those that protect individuals from SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as handwashing/sanitizing. This study investigated whether adherence to the World Health Organization's (WHO) handwashing guidelines (the outcome variable) was associated with the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, as measured by the following 6 indicators: (i) the number of new cases of COVID-19 morbidity/mortality (a country-level mean calculated for the 14 days prior to data collection), (ii) total cases of COVID-19 morbidity/mortality accumulated since the onset of the pandemic, and (iii) changes in recent cases of COVID-19 morbidity/mortality (a difference between country-level COVID-19 morbidity/mortality in the previous 14 days compared to cases recorded 14-28 days earlier). Methods: The observational study (#NCT04367337) enrolled 6064 adults residing in Australia, Canada, China, France, Gambia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, and Switzerland. Data on handwashing adherence across 8 situations (indicated in the WHO guidelines) were collected via an online survey (March-July 2020). Individual-level handwashing data were matched with the date- and country-specific values of the 6 indices of the trajectory of COVID-19 pandemic, obtained from the WHO daily reports. Results: Multilevel regression models indicated a negative association between both accumulation of the total cases of COVID-19 morbidity (B = -.041, SE = .013, p = .013) and mortality (B = -.036, SE = .014 p = .002) and handwashing. Higher levels of total COVID-related morbidity and mortality were related to lower handwashing adherence. However, increases in recent cases of COVID-19 morbidity (B = .014, SE = .007, p = .035) and mortality (B = .022, SE = .009, p = .015) were associated with higher levels of handwashing adherence. Analyses controlled for participants' COVID-19-related situation (their exposure to information about handwashing, being a healthcare professional), sociodemographic characteristics (gender, age, marital status), and country-level variables (strictness of containment and health policies, human development index). The models explained 14-20% of the variance in handwashing adherence. Conclusions: To better explain levels of protective behaviors such as handwashing, future research should account for indicators of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic., The study was supported by grant number 2020/01/0/HS6/00059 from the National Science Centre, Poland.