COVID-19 Symptoms and Mental Health Outcomes among Italian Healthcare Workers: A Latent Class Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to long-lasting consequences for workers leading to what has been termed a "psychological pandemic". Some categories, such as healthcare workers (HCWs), are considered high risk due to factors such as increased exposure and stressful working conditions. In this study, we investigate whether levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms and COVID-19-related fear (IES-6 and PSI-4) are associated with illness severity in a sample of 318 infected HCWs in Italy. To investigate the presence of different profiles of COVID-19 severity, Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was performed based on 11 symptoms. Differences in the IES-6 and PSI-4 scores across the latent classes were compared using the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test with Dunn's multiple comparison post hoc testing. Our analyses show that the LCA identified three classes of symptoms, reflecting no/low, mild and severe symptoms. The classes include vomiting, confusion, conjunctivitis, diarrhea, dyspnea, headache, ageusia, fever, anosmia, osteo muscle articular pain and asthenia. We found that HCWs who experienced more intense symptoms reported significantly higher IES-6 and PSI-4 scores. Moreover, we found gender-related differences in IES-6 and PSI-4 scores as females exhibited higher levels than males. Indeed, these findings are useful for developing health prevention and emergency management programs.