Vicarious traumatization: A psychological problem that cannot be ignored during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dear Editor:

Many thanks for the comments and suggestions on our recently published study entitled “Vicarious traumatization in the general public, members, and non-members of medical teams aiding in COVID-19 control” (Li et al., 2020). Until now, more than two million Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) patients have been confirmed around the world. It is well recognized that the psychological status in medical staff and general public cannot be ignored.

Our study was performed during the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan. Approximately 42,000 medical staff supported the control of COVID-19 in Wuhan from the rest of China. A correspondence mentioned that our study adopted the mobile app-based questionnaire and pushed it to individuals via WeChat, probably causing a bias of the enrolled individuals (Joob and Wiwanitkit, 2020). The main reason is that the strict isolation for stopping human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus did not allow us to perform large-scale and face-to-face studies during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The major objective of our study is to remind psychological and psychiatric experts to pay more attentions to the vicarious traumatization in medical staff and general public during the outbreak of COVID-19. A correspondence mentioned that the groups enrolled in this study did not remove confounding factors (Ghaffari et al., 2020). The main reason is that the enrolled front-line nurses from all over the country were middle-level backbone staff with rich work experience and psychological capacity. In addition, the current form of our research is short communication. Due to the space limitation, we failed to show more data, such as the result of regression analysis.

Our research was a cross-sectional study and found that the vicarious traumatization of non-front-line medical staff was more serious than that of front-line medical staff during the COVID-19 outbreak. It is noteworthy that the evolution of psychological problems is a developmental process. After short-term medical support work for COVID-19 control, the effects of various psychological stressors may be strengthened, and psychological problems will gradually emerge. The onset of psychological crisis is commonly 3 months after the end of medical support work, and its peak is approximately 6 months later (Hsiao et al., 2020). Therefore, even though the COVID-19 epidemic is over, it is of great importance to continue tracking the development of vicarious traumatization in medical staff as well as the general public.