Towards a syndemic public health response to COVID-19

作者：M. H. Rod, Naja Hulvej Rod · 发表于：Scandinavian Journal of Public Health · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1177/1403494820982862 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Medicine

https://doi.org/10.1177/1403494820982862 © Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/ 403 9 82098 2 journals.sagepub.com/home/sjp The public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been centred on preventing, containing and treating COVID-19, and the success of the response has been evaluated by COVID-19 outcome measures. But in the same way as a tsunami is amplifying the currents and direction of the ocean, COVID-19 can be perceived as a major health shock that amplifies and interacts in complex ways with the composition and direction of public health dynamics. The higher mortality risks observed among people with pre-existing conditions [1], along with the rising evidence of social inequalities in the consequences of the pandemic [2], call for a syndemic [3,4] perspective with improvements in population health as our overall success criteria. As Bambra et al. has recently argued, COVID-19 is best understood as a ‘syndemic pandemic’ [5]. The syndemics framework enables us to understand how COVID-19 spreads and develops in synergistic interaction with other health conditions, and it draws our attention to the role of social environments in shaping the resulting impact on population health. As an analytical framework the syndemics framework may guide our understanding of how social inequalities are likely to evolve during the pandemic, while also emphasising the complex biological interactions between COVID-19 and other conditi...