Abstract
Classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has spread to Bangladesh since early March of 2020, and people are getting daily updates from the social and electronic media. We aimed at assessing the prevalence of anxiety among Bangladeshi people during the pandemic in connection with social media exposure (SME) and electronic media exposure (EME). For this cross-sectional study, data were collected from 880 participants by a self-administered online-based questionnaire relating personal characteristics, self-rate health (SRH), SME, and EME with anxiety. Findings show that around half of the surveyed population experienced a spike of anxiety (49.1%) during the pandemic, ten times higher than the national anxiety rate in 2019. The participants with an increased SME of over four hours per day experienced a higher level of anxiety than individuals with < = 2 hours exposure to social media. Similarly, the anxiety was higher among people with fair/bad SRH compared to individuals with excellent SRH. It is highly recommended to develop active surveillance and effective monitoring systems to reduce the spread of misinformation from both social and electronic media to improve the state of mental health conditions during the pandemic.
Highlights
The spread of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), among 114 countries and territories across the globe has made the World Health Organization (WHO) declare a global pandemic [1]
The mean (±standard deviation) age of 880 participants was 26.3 (±7.2) years, and the highest 42.0% were from the age cohort of 21–25 years
This study provides a preliminary idea of the pretext of the mental health conditions of Bangladeshi people during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The spread of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), among 114 countries and territories across the globe has made the World Health Organization (WHO) declare a global pandemic [1]. The mental health burden of the COVID-19 infected patients and the healthcare professionals, fearing the persisting social prejudice and stigma generated from ‘overexposure’ to media ‘misinformation,’ forced some people to commit suicide [22,23,24]. Some others are suggesting that the exposure to media during pandemic and epidemic increased severe mental health outcomes, including suicidal behavior [26,27,28]. Apart from the social exclusion and mental health issues, employment and financial issues led to suicide [21, 28, 29]
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