2021/07/21 The Syndemics of Emergency: How COVID19 Demands a Holistic View of Public Health Promotion and Prepa

Health emergencies encompass both acute events (e.g., pandemics, mass casualty events) and chronic ones (e.g., climate change, systemic racism and inequality) because both can overwhelm a community's ability to respond to them, albeit on different timescales. Syndemics, or synergistic epidemics, are the presence of multiple disease states that adversely interact with one another as well as their social and environmental contexts-ultimately amplifying their deleterious effects. COVID-19 is undeniably a syndemic. Environmental degradation contributed to the original viral spillover event, globalization fostered the virus's rapid spread, and political partisanship and failures in governance resulted in the pandemic spiraling out of control in countries such as the United States. In the months that followed, COVID-19 triggered economic freefall, ravaged those with preexisting conditions such as asthma and diabetes, and threatened progress on a wide range of health and development targets-all of which disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
 
Article Website:
 
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306116?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed
 
Journal Reference:
 
BCompH, Vinyas Harish. "The Syndemics of Emergency: How COVID-19 Demands a Holistic View of Public Health Promotion and Preparedness." American journal of public health 111.3 (2021): 353-354.