What has remained. The lockdown proved, by force, that thousands of companies could stay afloat with their employees working remotely and influenced the launch of telephone medical consultations.
If for the World Health Organization (WHO), health is: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease”, if we talk about community health, the same organization defines it as “the collective expression of the health of a defined community, determined by the interaction between the characteristics of people, families, the social, cultural and environmental environment, as well as by health services and the influence of social, political and global factors”. Therefore, a community health intervention is defined as an action carried out with and from the community through a participation process.
Four years have passed since then and things have changed from what they were before and people now understand that the major changes introduced and promoted by the pandemic, the coronavirus, have stayed and have transformed our way of life.
Telephone consultations
Telephone medical consultations, increased use of masks, especially in some public settings, teleworking, online shopping, and even physical distancing as a preventive measure are some examples of how our habits have changed.
It has been the legacy inherited from the pandemic, something we knew was here to stay but we still cannot evaluate how it really affects our health.
A good way to address community health is by developing networking at a local level. Networking consists of creating alliances, synergies between different agents, to establish common objectives and act together to achieve them, so that resources are better used. But these objectives have also been slowed down by the devastation that the pandemic left in our totally overwhelmed health system.
The value of the public and the community is something that the pandemic crisis, unprecedented in our recent history, has allowed us to rediscover or rethink the importance of the public sector, to which we now turn our attention in search of answers. We have realized, almost with astonishment, that the weaker the public health system is, the more difficult it was to provide a response to a health crisis like the last one.
Pandemic fatigue
Precisely four years after the start of the state of alarm decreed by the Spanish Government on March 14, 2020 with an initial duration of fifteen days, the virus has been more present than anyone initially predicted. With an uneven evolution in the first months, an atypical summer arrived with considerably fewer cases due to confinement and almost immediately the second wave due to the summer holidays, practically followed by the third since at Christmas the appropriate measures were not taken either despite the fact that the health services warned us daily of the urgent need to be more alert than ever.
As a result of this situation, the term ‘pandemic fatigue’ emerged, a concept that the World Health Organization (WHO) defines as “a lack of motivation to follow protection and prevention recommendations that increases over time.” According to experts, pandemic fatigue is a natural and expected response to a prolonged public health crisis whose severity has forced the implementation of restrictive measures that have had a strong impact on everyone, even those who have not been directly affected.
Specifically, according to data from a WHO survey, emotional fatigue affects 60% of the European population. Although experts consider this reaction to be natural and expected, they warn that the situation in some EU countries is now worse than at the peak in March 2020.
In Spain, 40% of people have severe or moderate symptoms of depression such as lack of interest, hopelessness or depression, according to the study ‘Psychological discomfort derived from Covid-19 in the second wave’, prepared by the General Council of Psychology of Spain.
Telemedicine
Covid forced companies to accelerate business processes and social behaviours that were unimaginable before the health crisis. The lockdown proved, by force, that thousands of companies could stay afloat with their employees working remotely. The pandemic also revealed the strength of the technologies that allow us to interconnect.
All this also influences what until very recently was our usual dealings with health professionals, since many of those consultations that we used to do in person are now done remotely. In this way, teleworking has also become part of medicine, a branch that has been little developed until now, which will also experience significant growth in the medium term, according to the forecast of many health experts.
The WHO defines telemedicine as “the provision of health services by health professionals through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs)”. This modality allows the exchange of “information valid for the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of diseases”.
Social networks
Our most recent generations of medical professionals have fortunately not had to face such a serious situation. “It is a scenario for which the university does not prepare, for which MIR exam questions have not yet been drawn up,” commented a medical student on social media and even the coronavirus has its own profile on X -formerly Twitter- @CoronaVid 19. From this profile and always in a humorous tone, this user echoes the latest news and comments on recent topics. “I’m going to be a question on the next MIR exam”
Our worldview is almost certainly different from the one we had in 2020. Medical schools will probably integrate distance learning as another tool in teaching medicine. We will certainly all learn something, but the mark that the crisis has left on healthcare professionals is indelible.
Blessed vaccines
Vaccines are the best preventive tool we have to fight infectious diseases. Who would have thought that in less than a year we would have a cure for the dreaded virus? Having a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was a health and social priority from the beginning. Under normal conditions, the development of a vaccine takes an average of 10 years. The race to research a vaccine to prevent Covid-19 accelerated to the maximum. Never before, for any other disease, have there been so many candidate vaccines in development and with such a high probability of being effective.
The rapid development of vaccines has undoubtedly been a great scientific success that has allowed us to begin to put an end to the pandemic, but there are still unanswered questions. We do not know, for example, how long the protection of the vaccines will last, how effective they will be depending on age, or whether they will protect us not only from the disease but also from infection.
We will probably have all the answers soon. The good news was the reaction that occurred in the midst of the crisis and that since the first vaccine until now, a significant number of people have been vaccinated in Spain, who also renew the dose every year, so there will be more and more people immunized and all this is thanks to science.