Revisiting "What Is an Epidemic?" in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons from the History of Latin American Public Health

Abstract

This essay considers what thirty years of scholarship on the history of epidemics in Latin America and the larger hemisphere can bring to a current reading of Charles Rosenberg's influential 1989 essay, "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective." It advocates that taking a broader geographical view is valuable to understanding better the arc of an epidemic in society. In addition, it proposes that, to see the ways in which the United States is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to place the United States alongside the experiences of other countries of the Americas rather than making comparisons to Europe.