Anxiety in Home-Quarantined Patients with COVID-19

Catalin Pleșea-Condratovici,Emil Răzvan Gatej,Alina Pleșea-Condratovici,Steliana Rizeanu

doi:10.18662/brain/13.1/288

Abstract

One of the challenges of the current pandemic in Romania has been the monitoring of COVID-19 positive patients isolated at home by their family doctors. There was no legal framework or experience in remote medical consultations and there were no clear and comprehensive guidelines for therapeutic management at the beginning of this study. As the pandemic evolved, one of the problems identified from practical experience was that anxiety in this category of patients is an underestimated factor. The present study aimed to provide some clarifying data on the level, determinants, effects and methods of addressing anxiety in COVID-19 patients isolated at home. This approach started on a number of N = 107 patients to whom demographic data were collected and an anxiety questionnaire was applied by telephone. In the next stage, in order to obtain valid results in a timely manner, an online questionnaire was completed by 71 family physicians from Galati County, Romania. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis was performed using Excel and SPSS software. The results showed that the level and importance of anxiety in these patients are underestimated and one of the key factors to avoid negative endings (delayed hospitalization or unjustified hospitalization) is the self-determination of peripheral oxygen saturation.

Highlights

The Covid pandemic is certainly one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world and one of the most anxious events globally, at least after the end of the Cold War.The whole world had to adapt to the pandemic, and health systems were in high demand
We chose the anxiety subset from The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) because it was developed to be used in hospitalized patients with somatic diseases, so does not include somatic symptoms as fatigue, sleep disorders or loss of appetite and is easy to administrate (Wu et al, 2021)
Even that 11.2% of the patients were known with preexistent anxiety disorder, only 13.70% of the patients received benzodiazepines 9.34% antidepressants and 18.69% received herbal OTCs

Summary

Introduction

The Covid pandemic is certainly one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world and one of the most anxious events globally, at least after the end of the Cold War. The whole world had to adapt to the pandemic, and health systems were in high demand. If at first all patients tested positive for Covid were hospitalized, the capacity of hospitals to absorb the large mass of Covid patients was soon exceeded. There was a need for Covid-positive patients with asymptomatic or mild symptoms to be isolated at home. The difficult task of remotely monitoring this category of patients fell in Romania to family doctors. Because non-Covid hospitals have severely restricted their activity as well as polyclinics, and patients' fear of becoming infected with COVID19 has greatly reduced calls to emergency services and other segments of health care, most family physicians have suffered from over burning during that period (Silistraru et al, 2021)

Methods

Results

Conclusion