On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (2020) classified the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) as a pandemic. Four days later the Peruvian government decreed a state of national emergency, which determined mandatory social isolation for all citizens (Decreto Supremo no. 044-2020-PCM). The said measure lasted 107 days and ended on 1 July 2020 (Decreto Supremo no. 094-2020-PCM). Although the quarantine is reported to have played a role in controlling the pandemic in the country (Córdova-Aguilar and Rossani, 2020; Arela-Bobadilla, 2020), as of 19 July 353,590 cases and 13,187 deaths had been recorded in Peru due to COVID-19 (Ministerio de Salud del Perú [MINSA], 2020). It is estimated that, this year, the country reported 4.2 times the number of deaths when compared to data from the previous year (Arela-Bobadilla, 2020), making Peru the seventh country most affected by the pandemic (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 2020).

These numbers demonstrate the importance of clinical and public health research for the control of the outbreak (Soto, 2020). In this context, the social conditions generated or aggravated by the pandemic, such as the number of suicides (Calderon-Anyosa and Kaufman, 2020) and cases of intimate partner violence (Agüero, 2020), represent a call for the development of social research, from which to provide useful information to public managers, leaders and the general public (Van Bavel et al, 2020). In addition, mental health research stands out as a fundamental axis for supporting the response to the crisis (Holmes et al, 2020). Thus, it is striking that, of the 40 studies financed by the Peruvian National Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnológico e Innovación Tecnológica (CONCYTEC), only four corresponded to the social or psychological sciences (Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación Tecnológica [FONDECYT], 2020a, 2020b).

At the international level, it is reported that the pandemic has generated mental health problems for the general population (Wang et al, 2020; Pierce et al, 2020), and for health personnel in particular (Li et al, 2020; Xiao et al, 2020). Although these studies do seem to indicate the prevalence of mental health issues as a result of the pandemic, there is still a scarcity of rigorous research in this field, with most of them being of an observational design (Rajkumar, 2020).