Covid-19

Dear IJIC editorsChile is living its hardest days, pushing its systems of care to its limits.In the face of the pandemic, Chile has not performed well: to date, Chile officially has about 350 thousand confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 7,300 deaths in a population of 18 million inhabitants.The factors that may have influenced this are multiple: there are enormous social inequalities and large population groups living in overcrowded, precarious conditions, who must mobilize to provide for themselves; the social and cultural changes generated by the neoliberal development model have created high levels of individualism and little capacity for a reduced and subsidiary state to guarantee essential social rights; the loss of credibility and trust in authorities and institutions has been aggravated by the social and political revolt that began in October 2019 and that Chile has not yet resolved, generating the pandemic only a parenthesis, which will undoubtedly be broken again, in a deeper way, by the economic crisis that will follow the health crisis; the biomedical and hospital-centric paradigm prevailing in the elites, the fragmentation and segmentation of the Chilean health system and the scant importance given to primary health care strategy (PHC), may be some of the possible factors.Chile is a country with great inequalities and its fragmented and segmented health systems replicate the inequitable ways in which society is organized.The pandemic has exposed the deep weaknesses of our health systems.The pandemic highlights key aspects that we must consider and that can explain our failures.Among these: the poor ability of the government to give governance to a fast and effective response; a tendency to prioritise economic

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Outbreak · Pandemic · Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 · Medicine · Public Health and Environmental Issues · Virology