SUS in the media in a pandemic context

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced new demands for services in healthcare systems around the world. In Brazil, the SUS became the object of interest of the media, which made efforts to cover government  actions and the system’s capacity to control the  pandemic. This study aims to analyze articles from the newspaper ‘Folha de São Paulo’ (FSP), regarding the  meanings produced about the Unified Health System  (SUS) in the COVID-19 pandemic. 231 articles were  analyzed, among the 524 published in the period  from January to May 2020, following the established  inclusion criteria. The corpus was categorized in four  senses: constitutional SUS, problem SUS, disputed  SUS and active SUS. The reflection on the diversity of  meanings attributed to the SUS points to the need to  expand the capture of the dimensions of the SUS.