Study of Behaviors and Psychological Indicators in Iranian Medical Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic Self-Quarantine

Following the sudden and global outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), called an infectious pandemic by the WHO, Iran also began fighting against this disease from February 19. One of the most important issues in this situation is the adherence to self-quarantine behaviors and its psychological impacts on community health. To date, it is not clear how the Iranian medical students have been adapted with self-quarantine neither and their psychological impacts. The purposes of this study were to investigate effect of self-quarantine on medical student’s behaviors and their psychological health during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

During the early stage of the nationwide lockdown, a total 607 Iranian medical students (63.4% females, range 18-51 years), who were in self-quarantine, participated in an online cross-sectional survey. The valid and reliable questionnaires included covid-19 self-quarantine behaviors, general health (GHQ-28), and impact of events-revised (IES-R) were used to collect data. Series of analysis tests like t-tests, one way-ANOVA and Pearson's correlation coefficient were conducted via SPSS v.25.

The results indicated suitable behaviors (57.09±22.36) and higher-level of adherence in females and married students that there is no member in their family affected with COVID -19(P-value<0.05). Respondents exhibited significant levels of mental disturbance (29.33±16.11) and PTSD symptoms (28.96±15.40) and also Pearson correlation test indicated a significant positive correlation between self-quarantine behaviors with psychological disturbance and PTSD symptoms (r=0.208 and 0.215, P-value =0.01).

Despite observing the appropriate behaviors in students during self-quarantine, but significant psychological effects due to self-quarantine condition have affected them. The results of this study can help professional health policy makers to determine special strategies for promoting appropriate behaviors during COVID-19 pandemic self-quarantine, controlling the resulting psychological impacts in medical students who considered as one the most important academic population.