[OCR-scanned text] Worrying about the early signs of mental health decline after a long period of time living with COVID-19, we initially conducted a pilot study on 501 college students from across Vietnam to evaluate the tremendous effect of this pandemic on students' mental health and wellness. Participants aged 18 and older, who provided informed consent, were eligible to complete an online questionnaire via Google Forms. The sur-veys were collected during October 2021, one of the heightened times of fighting against COVID-19 in Vietnam. The 5-item Brief Symptom Rating Scale (BSRS-5) (Cronbach's alpha, 0.84) was utilized to measure the six domains of mental stress, including sleep disorder, anxiety, distress, depression, the inferiority of others, and sui-cidal thought (Wu et al., 2022). More than half of the participants had normal mental health conditions (54.09%) (Table 1). In comparison, 45.81% had mental health prob-lems, of which moderate mental stress, slight mental stress, and severe mental stress accounted for 21.16%, 19.36%, and 5.39%, respectively. The vast majority of study par-ticipants were female, accounting for 80.24%. Among women, 21.64%, 20.40%, and 5.47% had moderate, slight, and severe mental stress, while these figures for men were 19.19%, 15.15%, and 5.05%, respectively. The proportion of participants who were vac-cinated against COVID-19 was 92.81%, of whom 21.51% and 5.38% had moderate and severe mental stress. On the other hand, 84.63% of study participants were medical students, of whom 23.40%, 18.6%, and 5.90% had moderate, slight, and severe mental stress, respectively.