Paper short abstract:

Since the spread of Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, incidence of contagion, death, access to treatment, perception of risk and socioeconomic crisis affected people differently, on the basis of racial, geographical and socioeconomic condition.

Paper long abstract:

Covid-19 pandemic may be better described as syndemics, a concept introduced by Merrill Singer e Emily Mendenhall, to describe a situation in which bacteria or viruses take action in human societies, interacting with a series of factors, such as: socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, genetic and gender inequalities, geographical factors, public policies, urban architecture, religions, science (and its negation), public investment, drugs and vaccines, negationism, fake-news, etc. This perspective allows to consider illness, specifically Covid-19, as an assemblage, a multidimensional mesh, that interweaves biological, social and cultural issues in individual and social process of disease and health.

Even if, at the beginning, the coronavirus has been defined as a “democratic virus”, it has revealed soon different degrees of vulnerability among the population, whose life conditions have also been differently affected by pandemic and the consequent sanitary, economic, social, politic and information crisis.

Focusing on racial inequalities, that intersect with economic, social, geographic and gender differences and reproduce the slavery system, I explore the differences in risk perception and vulnerability (expressed in the number of deaths), as well as the different impacts of syndemics (manifest in the increase of unemployment, poverty, psychological problems, family conflicts, difficulties in facing social isolation, homework and online schooling) in Brazil. I also point out some collective actions of resistance and organization to face syndemics in marginalized social and religious groups.