Epidemiological reasoning skills of health-related university students toward corona virus infectionin its earlier onset

Background: Medical students receiving a lot of controversial data from different sources like media, academia and the international and local reports, and they have a lot of questions regarding the current novel corona virus disease 19 and facing difficulty in interpreting the epidemiological data to more conclusive information. This issue needs an epidemiological reasoning skill.
Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the epidemiological reasoning skills of medical students of Hadramout University in Yemen toward the current novel corona virus diseases.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted among a convenience sample of Hadramout University medical students from different departments and years. A self-administered structured questionnaire was designed to collect relevant data from students.
Results: Most of student's answers about the incubation period is more than 7 days (45%) but most of students did not know the exact period of communicability (51%). About 86% of students recognized that the main route of transmission is air droplet and the susceptibility is universe (72%). Most of students know that there is no specific treatment nor specific vaccine for COVID19 (77%).Most of students consider COVID 19 is epidemic (50%); the transmission is from person to person (81%), the causative agent is new agent (46%) and mode of transmission is already known but they consider the geographic distribution of the current diseases is worldwide (556%).As the data were collected in February 2020; and according to their knowledge and reasoning skills, students expected that the disease will continue up to months (69%), will spread globally (57%) and the deaths will increasing (77%), they expected the spread of the disease will affect negatively on the international trade (96%) and on the international tourism (95%).
Observations and Result: The left lateral ventricle was larger than the right one and both were larger in males and largest in sixth and seventh decade.
Conclusion: University students have good epidemiological reasoning skills if provided with updated knowledge.