Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the coronavirus which causes mild to moderate respiratory disease and resolves without requiring special treatment. The elderly and those with medical problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness until death.

The impact of COVID-19 on people’s livelihoods, their health, and our food systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems, and the world of work. Millions of enterprises face an existential threat. Nearly half of the world’s 3.3 billion global workforce is at risk of losing their livelihoods. The pandemic has been affecting the entire food system and has laid bare its fragility. Border closures, trade restrictions, and confinement measures have been preventing farmers from accessing markets, including for buying inputs and selling their produce, and agricultural workers from harvesting crops, thus disrupting domestic and international food supply chains and reducing access to healthy, safe, and diverse diets. Millions of agricultural workers – waged and self-employed – while feeding the world, regularly face high levels of working poverty, malnutrition, and poor health, and suffer from a lack of safety and labor protection as well as other types of abuse. With low and irregular incomes and a lack of social support, many of them are spurred to continue working, often in unsafe conditions, thus exposing themselves and their families to additional risks.
In the COVID-19 crisis food security, public health, and employment and labor issues, in particular workers’ health and safety, converge. We must rethink the future of our environment and tackle climate change and environmental degradation with ambition and urgency. Only then can we protect the health, livelihoods, food security, and nutrition of all people, and ensure that our new normal’ is a better one.

What is Mental Healthy?

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

The WHO constitution states: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” An important implication of this definition is that mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders or disabilities.

Key Fact

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted or halted critical mental health services in 93% of countries worldwide while the demand for mental health is increasing, according to a new WHO survey.

Countries reported widespread disruption of many kinds of critical mental health services:

• Over 60% reported disruptions to mental health services for vulnerable people, including children and adolescents (72%), older adults (70%), and women requiring antenatal or postnatal services (61%).
• 67% saw disruptions to counseling and psychotherapy; 65% to critical harm reduction services; and 45% to opioid agonist maintenance treatment for opioid dependence.
• More than a third (35%) reported disruptions to emergency interventions, including those for people experiencing prolonged seizures; severe substance use withdrawal syndromes; and delirium, often a sign of a serious underlying medical condition.
• 30% reported disruptions to access for medications for mental, neurological and substance use disorders.
• Around three-quarters reported at least partial disruptions to school and workplace mental health services (78% and 75% respectively).