Mental Health Burden among Healthcare Workers during the COVID-19 Time in Albania

Healthcare staff that operated at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19 hence faced enormous physical and mental pressures. We aim to investigate the mental health situation among physicians and other medical employees in Albania. A cross sectional and descriptive survey was conducted from September 2020 to January 2021 time when COVID-19 in Albania was at its peak. X2/Fisher exact test was used;a significant association between level of mental health and survey characteristics was made. P-value<0.05, while medical employees who work in Tirana had a higher significant score than those living in other regions p<0.05. Nurses and medical doctors were significantly more likely to report depressive symptoms compared to other medical employees chi 2 =85.2, 95% CI, a p-value of <0.05 than radiologists, stemmatologists, and pharmacists. Furthermore, the younger age groups <= 40 years and >55 were more prone to report likely fair, stress, and depressive symptoms compared to other ages (p-value=0.042). This study reports a high level of fair and stress and mild to moderate burdens of depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, studies with a large sample size to include all medical staff nationwide need to identify and evaluate mental health among medical staff in Albania. ASEAN Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 24 (1) January, 2023;1-13.

The Epidemiological Situation and Clinical Characteristic Aspect Cause by COVID-19 in Suspected Cases in Albania

BACKGROUND: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has forcefully entered our lives and profoundly changed the perception and habits of the world population since the December 2019. AIM: The aims of this study were to presents the epidemiology data and clinical characteristic aspect of patients suspected with COVID-19 and analyzed in the American laboratory in Tirana, Albania from August 2020 to March 2021. METHODS: This study includes 1205 suspected cases for SARS COVID-19. Professionally trained health workers collected the samples from suspected patients by using synthetic fiber swabs. Double specimens from nasopharyngeal and pharyngeal swabs were collected from each of person. A standard questionnaire about the demographic and clinical data was filled for each person. The software SPSS version 22.0 was used for analyzing all data and also the examination findings. RESULTS: The prevalence of SARS COVID-19 resulted to be 31.1%. The average age resulted 42.17 ± 18.6. The most predominant positive age resulted the age groups 31–40 years old and 41–50 years old with positivity 17.3% and 16.3%, respectively, with significant association p = 0.01. Male were the most analyzed and affected persons (61.6%) in this study with a strong significant association p = 0.0004. It turned out that more than half of patients refereed at least two symptoms in the same time of analyze and about 1/3 refereed more than three symptoms. We found an association for presence of all typical symptoms with positivity except the temperature. We identified that for all of these symptoms, the p value resulted less than 0.05. CONCLUSION: SARS COVID-19 in the early stages of the disease is highly contagious. For this reason, the screening of people with symptoms is recommended to determine who should be quarantined and be tested. In this manner, we can decrease the rate of infection and protect healthy people from infection.