The Issue of the Reading Skills in Medical Schools during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Beginning in early 2020, the world began experiencing the first effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As with other new emerging infectious diseases, it had been noted that a medical student’s ability to read about and learn the correct reactions to this kind of event is urgent (Al-Mohrej & Agha, 2017). Therefore, medical school students should educate themselves and read the information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) in order to fully comprehend different features of the emerging disease as well as highlighting its early recognition and the important components of prevention. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to emphasize medical students’ need to investigate new sources of information and how their success or failure in doing so depends on their reading comprehension strategies. For example, many medical students around the world lack the required knowledge pertaining to the recommended infection control measures. In Saudi Arabia, it has been revealed that medical students lack background knowledge in the basic sciences as well (Al-Mohrej and Agha, 2017). However, they showed a noticeable lack of awareness regarding the clinical features of MERS-CoV during the 2012 epidemic (Zaki et al., 2012). Additionally, problems relating to understanding the patient’s medical condition, delayed diagnoses, and inadequate preventive services usage were complicated by their reading hardships. In addition, the medical college curricula lacked explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies skills because the programs in medical education only included limited constituents of research skills. Such programs even today include very little explicit instruction of academic literacy for medical research (Roberts & Klamen, 2010; McNamara, 2010). Thus, medical students should educate themselves by reading the information provided by WHO and a call for more explicit instructional programs tackling the reading strategies pertaining to medical topics and research should be conducted.