Introduction
Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS COV-2) first emerged in Wuhan towards the end of 2019. The pandemic is now influencing the whole world with a large number of deaths, besides many other medical, mental health and social consequences. While the average population will show normal responses to pandemic stressors, others who are more mentally vulnerable to anxiety have had more emotional responses.Catastrophic thinking can trigger emotional reactions in the healthy population such as 1) panic disorder with anxiety, 2) specific phobias, 3) obsessive compulsive disorder, 4) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); 5) pain (1-3).
Sleep plays a unique role in the maintenance of immunity; the circumstances that affect its quality have been associated with a reduction in the response to vaccines and an increase in vulnerability to infectious diseases. Sleep can be affected in the COVID-19 pandemic, which naturally causes an increase in anxiety and stress, contributing to the deregulation of inflammatory and antiviral responses (4). There are various studies showing that sleep quality is significantly affected in healthcare workers. The reason for this is that healthcare workers are prone to increased working hours and labor intensity in the face of serious epidemics, not being able to find enough time to rest, chronic stress and psychological distress (5,6). The aim of this study is to evaluate the sleep behaviors of healthcare workers working in secondary and tertiary hospitals in a large population in Turkey, and we wanted to show how sleep quality was affected during the pandemic process by using the easily applicable Jenkins sleep scale (JSS).