Opinion: Stopping the syndemic: Covid-19 plus other debilitating and deadly diseases
With Covid-19 vaccines beginning to be distributed in the United States and other countries, and with health care professionals more knowledgeable about the virus, there’s hope we’ll be able to manage the new spike in cases and chart a course to recovery. But it will take a lot more than that to undo the damage this pandemic has caused.
As the pandemic rips across the world, taking lives and devouring health resources and economies, it is also creating a void in which other debilitating and deadly diseases are left undiagnosed and untreated. That means we aren’t merely facing a once-in-a-century pandemic. We’re facing a syndemic: the confluence of several epidemics.
