Lessons from COVID-19

Abstract

Regardless of the impact and even commotion that the so-called COVID-19 has been producing, for justifiable reasons, along with public opinion, the government, and most particularly, among managers and health professionals around the world, it is interesting and curious to point out that the well-known common flu (influenza) is, in fact, according to historians and analysts of the health/disease process, the most common infection and the greatest cause of death worldwide. 1,2 And this is not something recent, reliable statistical information and records are available until today. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, every 24 hours, the balance of new cases and deaths from the new coronavirus has been released, practically in real time, in almost every country in the world, connected by the World Health Organization (WHO).In reality, the climate of public calamity in which all nations have come to live with, even if their territorial space had no proof of initial cases of the coronavirus, is becoming possible the emergence of a new universal consciousness about health problems of all humanity, independently even of eventual or historical geopolitical incompatibilities. It is evident that the precursory character of this perspective cannot be assumed, even now, as a definitive guarantee that the various goals of the United Nations in the health sector, foreseen and agreed for the next 20, 30 or 40 years, starting with the milestone of the new millennium, will be able to assume a safe transit. However, the simple fact of having, at the end of each night, a quickbalance of how and when COVID-19 has been circulating around the world, and the progress of related measures, is of great importance for the awareness of the generalpopulation, and for the health professionals and managers'decision-making in the application of general and specific measures for its control.It seems unquestionable that the experience of the new coronavirus pandemic, in factis being, a "health tragedy", by reopening paths for a conceptual redefinition about nature, conditioning and correlated factors, the limitations, and on the other hand, promising perspectives for health policies and programs in each and every country or nations. It is already accepted that this is not just a new pandemic, characterized in the concepts and indications of epidemiology and classical public health. Thus, the theoretical support of a new concept is required: the syndemic, which, without excluding the conventional indicators of the health/disease process, rescues the environment in the dynamism of its economic and social factors, incorporating values of spirituality itself. These are, inclusive, the referential points of a new and promising doctrine of human development, already anticipated more than half a century ago by a Brazilian author (Josué de Castro) and, by now, accepted and consolidated by the United Nations.Therefore, anchored in historical background and conceptual principles, which today justify the interest of new approaches to the problem of COVID...