Background: The potential psychological, nutrition and food security impact of the virus in Africa countries like Ethiopia, which may have lower-capacity health systems and large vulnerable populations, is still unknown. Appropriate precautions and mitigation strategies must be developed and implemented across all public health sectors to prevent potentially devastating outcomes. Therefore, our study aimed to investigate the psychological, nutrition and food security impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its correlate among residents of the Ilu Abba Bor and Buno Bedelle zones, Southwest Ethiopia.

Methods: Community based cross-sectional study design was employed to collect data by interviewer administered pre-tested semi structured questionnaire from 663 households. Impact of Event Scale –Revised (IES-R) and Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) were used to assess the impacts of COVID–19 on psychological and food security respectively. Twenty one trained data collectors and seven supervisors were involved in the data collection process. Data entry was done by Epi-data version 3.1 and analyzed by SPSS version 24.0 statistical software applications. The strength of association between variables was assessed using crude and adjusted odds ratio by running logistic regression and the cut off point for declaring statistical significance will be the P - value <0.05 or 95% confidence interval.

Result: The response rate of the study was 97.5%. The prevalence of psychological impacts of COVID-19 among residents of the study area was 28.3% and also about 22.9% of the respondents were in the category of food insecure. Larger family size (four and above) and widowed women was strongly associated with household food insecurity, and self-employment and use of Khat (amphetamine like stimulants) in the past three months was associated with the psychological impacts of the respondents.

Conclusion and recommendation: The study shows that considerable proportion of household food insecurity and high prevalence of psychological impact among residents of the study area. Therefore, psychological interventions identifying and targeting high-risk populations with heavy psychological distress are in urgent need. Government, different stakeholders or local citizen should support residents, particularly affected by food insecurity.

Keywords: COVID-19, Psychological impact, Nutrition and food security, Ethiopia