Abstract

The resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put pressure on medical, social, and economic resources worldwide. These pandemic-related ramifications are especially true for low- and middle-income countries like the Philippines, which just concluded one of the longest lockdowns in Asia. The pandemic also impinged on population mental health. Earlier studies have documented and highlighted the pandemic ’ s mental health consequences (Xiang et al., 2020), but little is known about Filipinos ’ mental health during the outbreak. A study conducted in the Philippines found that about 28.8% of adults have moderate to severe anxiety but had a relatively small sample size ( n ¼ 1,897; see Tee et al., 2020) which may require further replica-tion to improve the generalizability of such findings. Our cross-sectional study examined the prevalence of severe anxiety in the Philippines using the GAD-2 and GAD-7 to urge further research and community response. We launched an online survey between gathered responses from 10,990 adults aged 18 – 75 ( Mean age ¼ 27.16, Nearly half of the respondents ( n ¼ 5,415 or 49%) were from the Philippines ’ largest island, Luzon, followed by those from the capital Manila ( n ¼ 4,797 or 44%). Four hundred ninety-six ( (cid:2) 4%) and 282 ( (cid:2) 3%) respondents were from Visayas and respectively. All respondents gave their informed consent, and no personal identifiers were collected. After survey completion, respondents were provided with linkage to care and contact details to medical/psychological services. The survey sought demographic information (e.g., gender, age, employment, marital status) and self-report anxiety (GAD-2 and GAD-7). Respondents first completed the GAD-2 ultra-brief screener ( a ¼ 0.81). From the total sample, 4,526 (41.18%) met the cutoff score for GAD-2 (i.e.,