The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in December has seen more than 76,000 cases in China, causing more than 3,000 medical staff infections. As the disease is highly contagious, can be fatal in severe cases, and there are no specific medicines, it poses a huge threat to the life and health of nurses, leading to a severe impact on their emotional responses and coping strategies. Therefore, this study will investigate nurses' emotional responses and coping styles, and conduct a comparative study with nursing college students. This study was conducted through the online survey 'questionnaire star' from February 1 st to February 20 th , 2020 in Anhui Province, using the snowball sampling method to invite subjects. The results found that women showed more severe anxiety and fear than men. Participants from cities exhibited these symptoms more than participants from rural areas, however rural participants experienced more sadness than urban participants. The nearer a COVID-19 zone is to the participants, the stronger the anxiety and anger. The COVID-19 outbreak has placed immense pressure on hospitals and those nurses at the frontline are more seriously affected. Hospitals should focus on providing psychological support to nurses and training in coping strategies.

Background: Affected by a Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, SinceDecember 2019, there have been more than 76,000 cases of COVID-19 in China, causing more than 3,000 medical staff infections. Due to COVID-19 spreads quickly, is highly contagious, and can be fatal in severe cases, and there are no specific medicines, it poses a huge threat to the life and health of nurses and has a large impact on their emotional responses and coping strategies. Methods:This study conducted an online questionnaire survey from February 1 to 9, 2020 to investigate the current state of emotional responses and coping strategies of nurses and college nursing students in Anhui Province. This study used a modified Brief COPE (Carver, 1997) and a emotional responses scale. Results:The results found that women showed more severe anxiety and fear than men. Participants from cities showed more anxiety and fear than participants from rural, but rural participants showed more sadness than urban participants. The closer COVID-19 is to the participants, the stronger the anxiety and anger. Compared with Nursing college students, nurses have stronger emotional responses and are more willing to use Problem-focused coping. People may have a cycle of "the more fear, the more problem-focused coping". And people may "The more angry, the more emotion-focused coping", "the more problem-focused coping, the more anxious, the more angry, the more sadness". All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

Due to the high infectivity and long incubation period of new coronary pneumonia virus (Li et al. 2020; Rothe et al. 2020), COVID-19 has evolved into a global pandemic, and more cases and isolation measures appear in the news. Since China first reported COVID-19 in December 2019, as of May 11, 2020, a total of 234 countries and regions have reported 234,073 confirmed cases and 9840 deaths. Although various measures have been taken globally to combat new coronary pneumonia for more than 5 months, the number of confirmed cases and deaths worldwide is still increasing dramatically. COVID-19 poses a huge challenge to public health worldwide (Pan et al. 2020) and has caused serious and widespread negative effects on human beings (Lin 2020; Ahorsu et al. 2020). The uncertainty and low predictability of COVID-19 not only threaten people's physical health, but also affect people's mental health, especially emotional, stress, and sleep problems (Rothe et al. 2020) COVID-19 is mainly spread through droplets, aerosols, etc. Therefore, the closer you are to the diagnosed patient, the more likely people are to be infected. People are required to stop work, suspend school, stop production, and restrict travel, so as to reduce the chance of exposure to COVID-19 patients. However, this isolation will also have a negative impact on people's mental health. But relative to COVID-19's direct physical and mental harm, isolation is still a good choice. But what about nurses on the frontline? Nurses who test and treat patients with COVID-19 have a