Willingness of Health Care Workers to Respond to Covid-19 Pandemic in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic;Health care workers;Willingness Received: February 08, 2021, Accepted: February 22, 2021, Published: February 26, 2021 Introduction An outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (abbreviated covid-19) was flrst reported in December, 2019, in Wuhan City in People's Republic of China [1,2] The World Health Organization categorized this novel scourge as a public health emergency on 30January 2020 and a month later it was classified as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 [3] The delivery of health care services will likely be challenged by the combination of increased patient care demands and staff shortages due to absenteeism induced by perceived threat to lives Initial estimates in the UK and USA during the covid-19 pandemic suggested that front-line healthcare workers could account for 10-20% of all diagnosed cases of covid-19 [7-9] To ensure effective running of health care services despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, it is essential that health care workers are willing to work There is dearth of data on factors that may influence willingness of HCWs to work during a pandemic, especially in resource poor setting like ours