*2.3. Instruments*

An electronic survey was developed for online completion by the participants. The data on this form can be grouped as follows:

General demographic items: mainly focused on the description of the sample, including issues such as age, gender, and position in the institution.

Demographic and self-care items related to the pandemic: developed to assess factors potentially related to mental and physical health in the pandemic. These included the time of isolation, belonging to a risk group for COVID-19, living or being a worker in essential areas, support received, and health habits (food, alcohol consumption, relaxing activities, and exercise) during pandemics. The questionnaire also contained an open question about the main current concerns of the participants. A very detailed description of the measures, used for each of these variables, was presented in a previous publication [23]. In this study, only the significant variables in that previous study were included as predictors of mental health, namely exercise, support for daily household activities and availability of people to listen, and psychological and psychiatric support.

Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation—Outcome Monitoring (CORE-OM) [24–26]: this is a self-report questionnaire developed in the United Kingdom for monitoring treatment outcomes in mental health. The original version has 34 items answered in a Likert scale format. The questions of the instrument can be grouped as risk scores (6 items) and nonrisk (NR) (28 items). For the present study, we chose to use the non-risk items as this set constitutes an indicator of mental distress. In the original study, the NR scale had excellent indicators of internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.94) [24]. It was used for the present study, the Brazilian Portuguese version adapted by Santana et al. (2015) [27] following the

guidance of the CORE System Trust (www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/cst-translation-policy accessed on 12 January 2021). The internal consistency (Cronbach alpha) of the NR was 0.94 for the May stage and 0.93 for both the June/July and August stages.

#### *2.4. Procedures*

The study was carried out at a university in southern Brazil after an agreement between the researchers and the university managers, specifically from the committee responsible for the pandemic contingency plan. Participation was invited through an institutional email sent to all employees and service providers in the institution. This email contained a link with access to an online form that took about 30 min. The form remained open for approximately 10 days from the invitation and further e-mails encouraging participation were sent during this period.

Data collection was carried out three times between May and August 2020, maintaining an interval of at least 4 weeks between the end of a collection and the beginning of the subsequent one. The first collection took place between the 9th and 10th week after the interruption of on-site activities at the University. The classes and other university activities remained remote throughout the data collection period.

Pseudonymous linkage of repeat completions was based on a code generated by the participant, maintained in the three collections. Participants who allowed further contact on the form received feedback of results from the survey between the stages.
