Psychiatry amid COVID-19: the Sri Lankan experience

Abstract

Communicable diseases however are not new and have been in existence from the pre-historic era. As far back as 430 BC, history records a disease with fever, thirst, bleeding and skin lesions that killed as much as twothirds of the world population (1). Since then, the world has survived several pandemics of plague, leprosy, smallpox, cholera and HIV/AIDS. SARS and MERS were more recent epidemics (2).