Understanding and reducing the fear of COVID-19.

The world is now plagued by a pandemic of unprecedented nature caused by a novel, emerging, and still poorly understood infectious disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Wu and McGoogan, 2020). In addition to the rapidly growing body of scientific and medical literature that is being published, extensive public reports and stories in both the traditional media and social media have served to generate fear, panic, stigmatization, and instances of xenophobia (Zarocostas, 2020).