Lessons from a Year of COVID-19 in Zambia: Reported Attendance and Mask Wearing at Large Gatherings in Rural Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Zambia instituted prevention behavior guidelines for social gatherings before the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on March 18, 2020. Guidelines included nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) including mask wearing, social distancing, and reducing sizes of gatherings. Within a larger cluster randomized trial of community-based parenting groups in four rural districts (three in Southern Province, one in Eastern Province), we collected 5,711 questionnaires from intervention participants between August 2020 and September 2021, during which the country saw two COVID-19 waves. Questionnaires asked about participation and behaviors at community gatherings. Generally, perception of risk of contracting COVID-19 was low for respondents in districts in Southern Province but higher for those in Eastern Province. The highest compliance to mask wearing was reported at clinics (84%) and church services (81%), which were the most frequently attended gatherings. Many funerals were attended by 200 to 300 people, but individuals were 30% less likely to report wearing masks (odds ratio [OR] = 0.71, 95% confidence ratio [CI]: 0.6-0.8) than those attending a clinic visit. After controlling for other variables, the odds of self-reported mask wearing at events were higher in January to March 2021 (adjusted OR = 1.5, 95% CI: 1.3, 1.7) and July and September of 2021 (adjusted OR = 3.0, 95% CI: 2.5-3.5), timepoints that broadly overlay with two COVID-19 peaks observed in Zambia. Results suggest guideline dissemination penetrated the rural areas. However, there is need to optimize the messaging to increase compliance to NPIs at high-risk gatherings, including funerals. The findings from this analysis should be considered as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".