Abstract

MENENDEZ, Eduardo L.. Consequences, visibility and denial of a pandemic: processes of self-care. Salud colect. [online]. 2020, vol.16, e3149. ISSN 1669-2381.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18294/sc.2020.3149.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown - once again - the decisive and structural importance of health/disease/care-prevention processes, as it has generated consequences and reactions in all areas of collective and individual life in ways that no other process could. That being said, it was expected that the intelligentsia would focus their attention on these processes; however, figures such as Agamben and Žižek leaped at the opportunity to frame the pandemic in terms of their perennially unfulfilled socio-ideological prophecies rather than attempting to understand the reality of the pandemic as a health/disease/care-prevention process. Taking these dominant tendencies among contemporary intellectuals as a starting point, in this article I analyze the self-care processes of micro-groups related to disease, which have informed health policies in all countries. In other words, the core strategy for combatting COVID-19 has been and continues to be self-care, which constitutes one of the basic structures that micro-groups generate in order to live and to survive, but that biomedicine has coopted as a “policy” of its own making, thereby masking once again the true locus of power in containing the pandemic.

Keywords : Pandemics; COVID-19; Health-Disease Process; Self-care.

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