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The COVID-19 pandemic has signified a new kind of disaster for the world, of perhaps the highest magnitude, longest duration, and most extensive geographical distribution in recent history, expanding the already extensive list of natural and anthropogenic devastating events.
Usually, the negative consequences of disasters tend to be assessed based on factors such as number of events, loss of life, property damage, and economic losses, however, there is an impact at the subjective level of individuals that profoundly affects the wellbeing of those who are exposed to the risk or have experienced a disaster, a circumstance for which no formal and systematic actions have yet been prepared to measure, avoid, mitigate and to provide the necessary support to achieve an early recovery. This subjective wellbeing (SWB) refers to how a person performs an overall assessment of his/her life, considering two large dimensions: happiness and satisfaction (Diener et al. 2003).
The COVID-19 pandemic is a biological disaster event, the risk for which has increased significantly due to globalization, expansion of cities, and agricultural borders. This type of risk has a systemic character which implies a concatenation of impacts and a high complexity, making it strongly difficult to manage and demanding a comprehensive and inclusive approach (Lavell and Lavell 2020). The systemic nature of the risk has been clearly observed as the pandemic has materialized in most countries across the world. The primary effects of COVID-19—the severity and high transmission rate of the disease—generated the need for strong confinement measures that consequently affected employment, income, mental health, education, etc., resulting in a concatenation of impacts of various kinds, not limited to health.
As is often the case in disaster events, the highest levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths were observed in the most vulnerable and unprotected sectors of society in Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC) where important socio-territorial inequalities exist. Heavily fragmented, LAC cities are a mosaic of unequal areas under environmental conditions, provision of services, population density, income, access to housing, health, education, overcrowding and others, reflecting the prevalence of deficient urban development models. To the severe and direct consequences of the pandemic: disease and death, must be added the negative effect generated by the mitigation actions taken to contain the disease, where, in addition to the enormous economic losses, the impact is recorded at the sociocultural and psychological level, creating circumstances detrimental to the population’s subjective wellbeing. On the other hand, the social capital offers an opportunity to study new social dimensions that contribute to the resilience of communities (Castro-Correa et al., 2020), that is, in their ability to absorb the impact of a crisis or stress.
This study analyzes the loss of SWB conditions that people have suffered due to the effects of the measures taken to control the COVID-19 pandemic, through a comparative analysis of the differentiating factors of this problem, associated with socio-territorial aspects in different LAC cities.