Anxiety, worry and perceived stress in the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, March 2020. Preliminary results.

Rosario Sinta Gamonal Limcaoco; Enrique Montero Mateos; Juan Matias Fernandez; Carlos Roncero

The main finding in the Liao et al. 2014 , study is that affective measures of risk perception generally had stronger associations with reported modification of health protective behaviours. The behaviours examined in this survey to reduce the exposure to the infection were: the higher concern in avoiding crowded places and performing hand sanitising conducts almost all the time. No significant correlation was found between the reported cases and deaths of COVID in the country at the time of the survey and the PSS-10 score. Additionally, results did not identify significant differences in stress levels between countries that are currently in quarantine and those that are not, although this finding is limited as the sample of non-quarantined countries is small. As previously described in other infectious outbreaks, Bragazzi et al. 2017 , at country level there was a correlation between digital interest toward coronavirus and epidemiological data (total cases and death reported), which was not found in this study with the PSS-10. Nevertheless, further studies will be required to explore the possible association.