COVID-19 fear among junior undergraduate nursing students during the pandemic in South Africa.

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing students continued to work in facilities to complete clinical hours. Little was known about the impact of COVID-19 on nursing students during this time.

Aim: To investigate fear of COVID-19 among junior undergraduate nursing students during the pandemic.

Setting: A student nursing school at a university in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 559 nursing students. A self-administered questionnaire with the validated COVID-19 fear scale (α= 0.84) was distributed. Scale reliability, factor analysis, means and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for items, overall scale and associations with demographic variables were tested using Kruskal-Wallis Independent Samples and Mann-Whitney U tests.

Results: There were 370 respondents (68.51% response rate), predominantly female (294, 79.5%) and exhibited a mean age of 21.9 years (± 3.9). More than half, 192 respondents (51.9%) reported mild fear of COVID-19, 103 (27.8%) moderate fear and 57 (15.4%) severe fear. Apart from gender, no significant demographic associations with overall COVID-19 fear were found. Factor analysis identified two distinct factors, physiological and emotional expressions of fear (moderate significant positive correlation between factors [r = 0.541]).

Conclusion: The study's findings reveal that junior undergraduate nursing students, during the pandemic, generally reported experiencing mild fear related to COVID-19.

Contribution: This study contributes to the field of COVID-19 fear studies, provides insight into factors influencing fear levels and validates the scale's factor structure.