Guest edited by Nicole Probst-Hensch, Sarah Tschudin Sutter, Berhane Beyene, Zun-You Wu, and Xiao-Nong Zhou
A thematic series in Infectious Diseases of Poverty.
The COVID-19 pandemic that was declared on 11 March 2020 has affected countries on all continents. Targeted community interventions with sufficient transparency and public engagement and trust may help delay the exponential spread of the outbreak and “flatten the epidemic curve”. Key community mitigation strategies may include cancellation of non-essential events; social distancing measures; contact tracing; SARS-CoV-2 testing; community and education.
The majority of countries has instigated strict interventions (some forms of lockdown) to slow down the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nevertheless, these interventions come with a cost. Participatory, transdisciplinary engagement between academic, government and community representatives contribute to identify rapidly effective, acceptable and feasible control strategies while keeping economic activities and the daily life going as much as possible. It matters a lot that how long these interventions continue and how governments help economies recover, people go back to their normal life, and prevent the second wave of the pandemic.
Infectious Diseases of Poverty is launching a new Thematic Series entitled Community management and recovery from COVID-19 pandemic to provide evidence for policy-making. The Series will focus on evidence on the trade-off between the harm due to COVID-19 and the associated economic damage due to the public health interventions; building resilient infrastructure and lifestyles with appropriate social care provisions; models of economic recovery; comprehensive epidemiology and transmission mechanisms, measurement of community prevalence and the ratio of susceptibles to non-susceptibles, risk assessment, etc.
