Vol. 44 No. especial 4 dez (2020): Covid-19: knowing to face future challenges

The editorial of this special issue of Saúde em Debate ‘Covid-19: knowing to face future challenges’ opens the journal with the following excerpt, signed by the scientific editors:

“Since February 25, when the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in Brazil, we have sadly accumulated 175 thousand deaths and over 6.5 million infected people until the first week of December 2020. Declared by the World Health Organization as a pandemic on March 11, the disease moves from the wealthiest neighborhoods to the peripheries; and from large urban centers to cities in the countryside, spreading throughout the country during these months, drawing a wide curve in which the highest levels of incidence, transmission rate and deaths stand out in the months of June, July and August. Without the control of the disease and still with a significant transmission rate, Covid-19 is growing again in the country, this time having the entire national territory as its epicenter. Brazil currently ranks seventh and ninth among the countries with the highest mortality and lethality rates, but this situation may change in view of the increase in the number of cases of the disease, the extinction of the emergency income and the resumption of the expenditure ceiling law with the risk of a loss of around R$ 40 billion for the Health budget as of 2021. In accentuating the unjust social inequalities that persist in the country, Covid-19 reveals its discriminatory nature in affecting the poorest and most vulnerable, sacrificing invisible subalternized populations – indigenous, black, gypsy, quilombolas, homeless, refugees”.

It gathers manuscripts with the following themes: multilateralism, world order and COVID-19; BRICS in the context of the pandemic; political management of COVID-19 in Portugal; the SUS in times of COVID-19; social protection in times of COVID-19; COVID-19 and federative coordination in Brazil; SUS funding and COVID-19; Epidemiological Surveillance and COVID-19 in Brazil; hospital care in times of a pandemic; Primary Health Care in the SUS network to face the pandemic; mental health in Brazil during the pandemic; morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 according to race/color/ethnicity; limitation of COVID-19 notification data; COVID-19 in the Baixada Santista Metropolitan Region; public and private offer of beds and access to health care in the pandemic in Brazil; use of private hospital beds by public health systems in Brazil; survival of the SUS in times of a pandemic; the pandemic in the favelas; Niterói’s experience in municipal coordination and articulation during the pandemic; emergency national training in Mental Health and Psychosocial Care in COVID-19; analysis of experiences in the pandemic in vulnerable populations; noise pollution in the urban environment during the pandemic; gender and race inequalities in the pandemic.