To interpret the results obtained, we gave an analytical description and targeted interpretation of the answers to the items included in the questionnaire that contained the demographic characteristics of 631 participants. Demographic results of the present study were given in the following sections. The participants’ age ranged from 10 to 67(mean=29.39, sd=0.372). All participants who joined this study on a volunteer basis. In addition, a substantial majority of participants (568, 90.02%) had at least a bachelor’s degree. Our survey results suggested that most of these participants were highly educated, and most of them had no professional background in the field of biomedicine, public health or psychology. (See table 1)
Concerns on COVID-19 Outbreak
Giving the severances of the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, it was not surprising that citizens paid much attention to the outbreak. Among 631 participants, about 36.61% (231) of them “often” or “always” spent time on the COVID-19 news, 32.17% of participants “normally” spent time on the COVID-19 epidemic news, and the rest of them paid attention on outbreak news “sometimes”. In addition, we also observed that negative information or fake news made up large proportion of participants’ message source. 398 (63.07%) participants replied that more than a half of outbreak news was negative. It was likely to be an important factor accounting for participants’ psychological disturbance.
Psychological Health
Our survey revealed that most of them felt good or excellent. In addition, we asked the participants seven questions about their levels of psychological feeling. Table 2 showed the levels of psychological feelings and participants’ answers. We discovered that most of our participants were influenced by this epidemic outbreak, and that approximately 5% of the study participants reported a severe level of anxiety, as they had been worried during quarantine.
Spearman rank correlation analysis
The Spearman rank correlation analysis (Table 3) showed that current health situation had relation with hard to relax (p-value <0.001, r=0.197), cannot stop worrying (p-value <0.001, r = 0.142), easily upset or irritable (p-value <0.001, r = 0.208), cannot sit still (p-value = 0.002, r = 0.126), feel nervous or anxious (p-value =0.008, r =0.106), feel something bad about to happen (p-value<0.001, r=0.171) and worry too much (p-value <0.001, r=0.144).
Proportion of negative news appears to be correlated with hard to relax (p-value <0.001, r=0.223), cannot stop worrying (p-value <0.001, r = 0.309), easily upset or irritable (p-value <0.001, r=0.248), cannot sit still (p-value <0.001, r=0.139), worry too much (p-value <0.001, r=0.277), feel nervous or anxious (p-value <0.001, r=0.322), feel something bad about to happen (p-value <0.001, r=0.232).
Time spent on 2019nCoV related news seemed to be correlated with hard to relax (p-value <0.001, r=0.231), cannot stop worrying (p-value <0.001, r = 0.295), easily upset or irritable (p-value <0.001, r=0.250), cannot sit still (p-value <0.001, r=0.217), feel nervous or anxious (p-value <0.001, r=0.315), feel something bad about to happen (p-value <0.001, r=0.265) and worry too much (p-value <0.001, r=0.327).
In addition, whether participants who were under quarantine or not had correlation with feeling feel nervous or anxious (p-value = 0.042, r = 0.081), cannot stop worrying (p-value =0.027, r = 0.089), suggesting quarantine was not an immediate cause for anxiety.