Shades of Fear—Mental and Physical Health Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Representative Study of Polish Society

Abstract

The study was carried out one year after the establishment of the pandemic state in the European Union (EU), the situation at the end of the next wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland. The survey was conducted on a representative sample of Polish people using Computer Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI), considering several demographic categories, such as sex, age, place of residence, education, and monthly income. The survey’s main objective was to find out whether the respondents feel fear related to pandemics and living in a pandemic, and if so, what the psychological and physiological symptoms of this fear are. Half of the respondents (50.2%) declared that they felt fear about what their life would look like after the pandemic, and every tenth person (10.1%) marked the highest level of fear on the scale. The respondents felt the psychological symptoms of the pandemic much more often than they felt the physical ones. The most common psychological symptoms were fear of the future (38.5% of them gave “often” and “very often” responses, together), despondency (29.2% of them gave “often” and “very often” responses), and mental tension (28.9% of them gave “often” and “very often” responses). A detailed analysis of data from representative studies showed that the responses in a pandemic are strongly determined by demographic categories, mainly sex and age, and they differ depending on the social group to which a person belongs.