Table 2.

The categories and sub-categories extracted from the data

Categories	Sub-categories
Death anxiety	Inductive death
	Mortality rate
	Nurses’ inability to help patients
Anxiety due to the nature of the disease	Disease severity
	Disease’s unknown dimensions
Anxiety caused by corpse burial	NA
Fear of infecting the family	NA
Distress about time wasting	NA
Emotional distress of delivering bad news	NA
Fear of being contaminated	NA
The emergence of obsessive thoughts	NA
The bad feeling of wearing PPEa	NA
Conflict between fear and conscience	NA
Public ignorance of preventive measures	NA

^a Personal protective equipment, NA not applicable