Fear of COVID-19

Why coronaphobia arrived without a measure

Coronaphobia was proposed as a distinct phobia specific to COVID-19 in a paper published in 2020 that set out a conceptual model of how it develops. The authors identify seven contributing factors:

• an unforeseen reality
• unending uncertainty
• the need to acquire new practices and avoidance behaviours
• a loss of faith in health infrastructure
• the infection of heads of state
• cautionary statements from international bodies
• what they call infodemia

Those, on their account, produce three things: interference with routine life, a catastrophising reading of benign symptoms, and social amplification of risk. Only one item on the whole list is about the virus. The rest are about what surrounded it.

The paper is explicit that its purpose is to make a measure possible. It offers the model so that future research can develop a psychometric instrument for coronaphobia, which is to say that when the term was proposed there was nothing to measure it with. What existed instead were the general-purpose scales: the Fear of COVID-19 scale and the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale.

What the Greek sample found

A cross-sectional study of 583 people from the Greek general population used the Fear of COVID-19 scale alongside the twelve-item short form health survey. The mean fear score was 18.3, and fear was higher in women, in people with other illnesses, and in people whose close contacts had them.

Then two results that a fear of catching a virus does not predict. People who had not caught COVID-19 were more afraid than people who had. And less fear was reported by unvaccinated people and by people who took in information about the pandemic less often.

Read together, the fear tracked exposure to the subject rather than to the disease. Somebody who had had it knew what it was; somebody who had declined vaccination had already settled the question for themselves; somebody who read less about it thought about it less.

The study's other conclusion is the one with clinical weight. Fear of COVID-19 was the single most important predictor of both physical and mental quality of life in that sample, ahead of every demographic and clinical variable measured.

Why the nurses closest were least afraid

A survey of 736 nurses working in COVID-19 designated hospitals and health units in Region 8 of the Philippines put the prevalence of coronaphobia at 54.76 per cent overall. The breakdown is the finding: 37.04 per cent among hospital nurses and 70.91 per cent among public health nurses.

The nurses closest to infected patients were the least afraid, by a factor approaching two. Gender, marital status and job status predicted anxiety, and personal resilience predicted it negatively.

The same survey recorded something else worth keeping. Of 736 frontline nurses, 19.94 per cent said they were willing to care for coronavirus patients and 9.40 per cent said they were fully prepared to. Fewer than one in ten of the people doing the work considered themselves ready for it.

What the word is for

Coronaphobia is not in any diagnostic manual and was never going to be. It was coined in 2020, during the event, to name a reaction to it, by researchers who needed a handle for what they were measuring, and the expressions fear of COVID-19 and coronaphobia were used interchangeably in the literature from the start.

What it has that most words in this catalogue lack is data. It arrived with scales already built for it, it was measured in dozens of populations within two years, and the numbers turned out to describe something other than a fear of a virus. That is an unusual thing for a phobia word to be able to demonstrate about itself.