The Necessity of Preventing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The new coronavirus, as an acute and severe respiratory syndrome, was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread to other parts of China and also other countries (1, 2). It commonly has the following symptoms: fatigue, fever, cough, shortness of breath, and headache (1) that normally appear after an incubation period of 4 - 6 days (3). COVID-19 has higher transmissibility than MERS and SARS, and each patient can infect about 5.7 individuals (4).