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. 2022 Mar;76(3):310-316.
doi: 10.1136/jech-2021-217529. Epub 2021 Sep 17.

Tuberculosis in times of COVID-19

Alexandra Jaye Zimmer  1   2 , Joel Shyam Klinton  2   3 , Charity Oga-Omenka  1   2 , Petra Heitkamp  2   3 , Carol Nawina Nyirenda  4 , Jennifer Furin  5 , Madhukar Pai  6   2
Affiliations
Free PMC article

Tuberculosis in times of COVID-19

Alexandra Jaye Zimmer et al. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2022 Mar.
Free PMC article

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruptions to tuberculosis (TB) care and service delivery in 2020, setting back progress in the fight against TB by several years. As newer COVID-19 variants continue to devastate many low and middle-income countries in 2021, the extent of this setback is likely to increase. Despite these challenges, the TB community can draw on the comprehensive approaches used to manage COVID-19 to help restore progress and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on TB. Our team developed the 'Swiss Cheese Model for Ending TB' to illustrate that it is only through multisectoral collaborations that address the personal, societal and health system layers of care that we will end TB. In this paper, we examine how COVID-19 has impacted the different layers of TB care presented in the model and explore how we can leverage some of the lessons and outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic to strengthen the global TB response.

Keywords: COVID-19; health services; public health; tuberculosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: MP serves as an advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WHO Stop TB Partnership and Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics.

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