Résumé
Too often African knowledge systems are excluded from formal discussions surrounding public health, as they are often perceived traditional mechanisms that operate outside the sphere of mainstream science and medicine. Yet with the diffusion of COVID-19 across the globe, new conversations have emerged in relation to Africa's community-based successes in responding to the virus and its impacts. This chapter employs a geographical analysis of Senegal in order to highlight the ways in which Senegalese have approached the diffusion of COVID-19 and successfully controlled its spread. Using maps and qualitative data, this chapter underscores the ways in which global public health experts can draw from the expertise of African nations given the complex ways they have responded to both this pandemic and previous health emergencies. Findings indicate that science and community-based response systems are the key to Senegal's management of coronavirus. This chapter aims to subvert dominant discourses, which suggest that African states somehow stumbled upon their pandemic-related successes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
Résumé
The aim of this rapid analysis was to investigate the spatial patterns of COVID-19 emergence across counties in Colorado. In the U.S. West, Colorado has the second highest number of cases and deaths, second only to California. Colorado is also reporting, like other states, that communities of color and low-income persons are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Using GIS and correlation analysis, this study explored COVID-19 incidence and deaths from March 14 to April 8, 2020, with social determinants and chronic conditions. Preliminary results demonstrate that COVID-19 incidence intensified in mountain communities west of Denver and along the Urban Front Range, and evolved into new centers of risk in eastern Colorado. Overall, the greatest increase in COVID-19 incidence was in northern Colorado, i.e., Weld County, which reported the highest rates in the Urban Front Range. Social and health determinants associated with higher COVID-19-related deaths were population density and asthma, indicative of urban areas, and poverty and unemployment, suggestive of rural areas. Furthermore, a spatial overlap of high rates of chronic diseases with high rates of COVID-19 may suggest a broader syndemic health burden, where comorbidities intersect with inequality of social determinants of health.
Résumé
Latin America has emerged as an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador report some of the highest COVID-19 rates of incidence and deaths in the region. These countries also face synergistic threats from multiple infectious diseases (that is, ecosyndemic) and quasi-periodic El Niño-related hazards every few years. For example, Peru, which is highly sensitive to El Niño, already copes with an ecosyndemic health burden that heightens during and following weather and climate extreme events. Using an ecosyndemic lens, which draws on a multi-disease hazard context of place, this commentary highlights the importance of El Niño as a major factor that not only may aggravate COVID-19 incidence in the future, but also the broader health problem of ecosyndemic vulnerability in Latin America. © 2020, The Author(s).