COVID-19 is a major source of fear, stress, and anxiety as well as a major factor impacting the health and wellbeing of people worldwide. The present study builds on the recently developed "Fear of COVID-19 Scale" (Ahorsu et al., In International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-020-00270-8, 2020). The sample comprised of 850 participants, male and female young adults from Russia and Belarus. The majority of survey participants are university students and graduates. Females, students, and others from Russia report higher levels of COVID-19-related fear than those from Belarus. Respondents from Russia and Belarus report less fear than people from Iran who were surveyed earlier. The scale used for the present survey evidenced a good Cronbach's Alpha measure of internal consistency or reliability (0.809). Clearly, further research is needed across locations and over time about the nature and extent of fear caused by COVID 19. Overall, the FCV-19S appears to be a valuable and brief instrument that may provide useful information for intervention and policy purposes to migrate fear and problem behavior linked to infectious disease outbreaks.

Coronavirus was first detected in November 2019 (Chan et al. 2020). The infection spread quickly in Wuhan (the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei) and then throughout China and other countries including the Russian Federation (RF) and Republic of Belarus (RB). In early May, more than 190,000 Russians and 20,168 Belarusian were infected (Johns Hopkins University 2020).Russia and Belarus were part of the former Soviet Union and have a similar culture-a single written language and common religion; also, there are close economic and political relations. However, Russia and Belarus have chosen different strategies in fighting COVID-19.Russia has taken a path similar to most European countries-strict quarantine (self-isolation), movement restriction, social distancing, mandatory use of personal protective equipment including masks and gloves, public event bans, as well as border and air traffic closures. In comparison, Belarus has not endorsed quarantine and has proceeded with "life as usual" without closing borders, businesses, restaurants, museums, cinemas, schools, or universities. It has imposed a 2-week quarantine of Belarusian citizens who came from countries with the coronavirus epidemic.Pandemic-related conditions are linked to negative economic consequences effecting living conditions at all levels (Atkeson 2020;Baker et al. 2020) and increased mental health incidents. Evidence about the psychological impact of coronavirus points to conditions of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicide (Galea et al. 2020;Sorokin et al. 2020; Wan 2020) as well as confusion, anger, fear, boredom, stigma, and stress over the loss of

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused universities worldwide to limit operation, shift traditional classroom learning to internet instruction, and restrict contact through recommended social distancing (WHO 2020a). Such actions have been taken in spite of a possible mental health tsunami (Carson et al. 2020) resulting from factors of social isolation (Holmes et al. 2020), substance misuse (Gritsenko et al. 2020;Zolotov et al. 2020), and other maladaptive coping mechanisms (Bender et al. 2020;Cheng et al. 2020).The experience of living in the pandemic has heightened interest in personality factors that may serve as a bulwark against fear, stress and other COVID-19 negative impacts. Psychological resilience, understood as the ability to psychologically or emotionally cope with a crisis or quickly return to a pre-crisis state, is increasingly seen as a protective factor (Barzilay et al. 2020; Walsh 2020; Yıldırım and Solmaz 2020). Among university students, harmful pandemic effects on psychological and emotional well-being have been observed (McKay and Asmundson 2020). However, few studies have examined the evolution of such effects and resilience among university students with service responsibilities to high risk clientele (Isralowitz et al. 2020;Zolotov et al. 2020).This study aims to examine COVID-19 related fear and its association with psychoemotional conditions including substance use among Israeli and Russian social work students at two peak points or waves of infection. The first study was conducted in May and the second, including examination of student resilience, in October/November, 2020. It is hypothesized

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