Table 3.

Factors associated with belief in Misinformation and Conspiracies

	Belief in misinformation(a)		General conspiracy belief(b)
Predictors	Estimates (95% CI)	P value	Estimates (95% CI)	P value
Age			0.09 (0.03, 0.15)	0.075
Education level
Under 9 years	0.06 (-0.02, 0.13)	0.152
Non-university	0.10 (0.03, 0.17)	0.006
University or higher	Reference
Having a chronic illness
Yes			-0.37 (-0.71, -0.03)	0.035
No or do not know			Reference
Trust in non-medical institutions to manage COVID-19	0.04 (0.02, 0.06)	<0.001	-0.11 (-0.19, -0.02)	0.014
Trust in medical sectors to manage COVID-19	-0.03 (-0.05, -0.01)	<0.001
Health Literacy	0.03 (0.02, 0.04)	<0.001	0.09 (0.03, 0.15)	0.005
Being a health professional
Yes	-0.08 (-0.12, -0.04)	<0.001
No	Reference
Being infected with COVID-19
Yes			-1.08 (-1.68, -0.48)	<0.001
No			Reference
Knowing someone in your immediate social network who has or had COVID-19
Yes			0.26 (0.03, 0.48)	0.025
No			Reference
Frequency of media consumption
Never/Rarely			Reference
Sometimes			-0.52 (-0.78, -0.26)	<0.001
Often/Very often			-0.10 (-0.36, 0.16)	0.461
R2/Adjusted R2	0.11/0.10		0.10 / 0.08
F-statistics	<.001		<.001

Note: Linear regression was performed for both models using the backward elimination approach based on the Akaike Information Criterion for model selection. The full model for both models were adjusted for age (continuous), gender, education level, chronic disease, health literacy (continuous), trust in non-medical institutions (continuous), trust in the medical sector (continuous), trust in media sources (continuous), being a health professional, being infected with COVID-19, knowing someone who was infected with COVID-19 and frequency of media consumption.

^(a)Belief in misinformation: average score of four misinformation questions (0: not misinformed, 1: high misinformed)

^(b)General conspiracy belief: many very important things happen in the world which the public is never informed about. (1: definitely false, 7: definitely true)