Since the COVID-19 outbreak, China has implemented comprehensive government and social mobilisation, and the epidemic has gradually been brought under control [13]. This study involved a comprehensive investigation of the COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours of personnel returning to work in the post-epidemic period, focusing on identifying factors that influence compliance with preventive behaviours. The respondents showed a generally good level of overall compliance; however, some areas required attention (e.g., covering your mouth and nose when sneezing, avoiding close contact with people with respiratory diseases). Education, occupation, quarantining, anxiety, and knowledge factors impacted the respondents’ health behaviours. This indicates that interventions such as health education, continued strict implementation of isolation policies, and psychological counselling should be administered, as this could enhance such workers’ compliance with the recommended health behaviours and lifestyles.
The present findings showed that the higher the participants’ academic background, the better their compliance with preventive behaviours. This may be because highly educated individuals may be more likely to learn and accept the COVID-19-related behavioural requirements. Recent studies have reported that a higher education level predicts higher knowledge of COVID-19 [14, 15], which accords with the present findings. This indicates that more comprehensive knowledge of COVID-19, especially regarding prevention and control measures and prognoses, leads to better behavioural compliance and a more active response to COVID-19 prevention and control measures. Concurrently, this study found that the respondents had a poor understanding of the sources of COVID-19 infection, the transmission routes, and the symptoms of infected people. Public information campaigns and educational interventions could improve the overall awareness of infectious-disease-prevention knowledge [16]. Thus, relevant government departments should strengthen knowledge dissemination regarding the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 and training regarding symptom recognition. Further, medical personnel, while conducting health-monitoring work, could contribute to this by issuing informational manuals, WeChat short videos, etc.
The respondents’ occupations were related to their compliance with preventive behaviours, with office and management personnel and professional and technical personnel returning better scores than outdoor workers. This may be related to the low educational level of outdoor manual workers. Therefore, government health departments and enterprises should focus on performing temperature detection among and providing health education for outdoor workers. Businesses should conduct regular, scientific, and effective disinfection of workplaces, including the cleaning and disinfection of public areas such as offices, production workshops, vehicles, restaurants, elevators, meeting rooms, toilets, and object surfaces [17].
According to the pathology and characteristics of the COVID-19 epidemic, everyone is susceptible [18]. Our results showed that quarantined people had better compliance with preventive behaviours than did non-quarantined people. This indicates that people who have taken quarantine measures pay more attention to prevention and control behaviours, which plays a positive role in epidemic prevention and control. Research has shown that quarantining facilitates symptom surveillance, which allows early diagnosis and reduces the risk of infecting others [19] [20]. Therefore, migrant workers should be placed in isolation and observed before they return to work. During the isolation process, health education can be conducted through video courses, media, direct education, etc. Concurrently, businesses should disseminate information regarding preventive measures for COVID-19 through public announcements, bulletin boards, WeChat public accounts, and banners in workplaces. Before resuming work and production, businesses should provide all employees with information regarding COVID-19 prevention and control. Information manuals for such prevention and control measures and a practical mental health manual could be developed [21], which could help employees improve their awareness of how to protect themselves.
Studies have shown that anxiety is common during epidemics, and that psychological conditions influence behavioural compliance [22]. In this study, people with strong anxiety were found to be more likely to have poor compliance with preventive behaviours. From this finding, it is clear that anxiety is linked to a lack of awareness and reluctance to perform recommended behaviours. The reason why anxiety would result in these attitudes is that people with anxiety may, in an attempt to avoid experiencing further distress and fear, seek to avoid reports in the news and on the Internet regarding the epidemic, which would result in these people being less informed regarding the virus and its characteristics. Businesses should be aware of the employees’ mental-health status before they return to work, and should provide psychological consultation services if necessary [23]. Further, false information on the Internet regarding COVID-19 can cause panic [28]; therefore, in the short term, it is necessary to strengthen the management of online information and support scientific, in-depth, and continuous reporting by official media channels, which would serve to guide the direction of public opinion [24]; in the long term, public health literacy should be greatly improved [25].