Análise sistêmica do município de São Paulo e suas implicações para o avanço dos casos de Covid-19¹

ABSTRACT

During the first semester of 2020, the city of São Paulo was ravaged by the covid-19 pandemic 19. As a global city, São Paulo became the epicenter of the pandemic in Brazil. Displaying high levels of inequality, São Paulo ended up exacerbating the vulnerabilities related to the outbreak. In this work, we applied the software BioNetStat to census data pertaining to the city of São Paulo. Our analysis was based on the work of Nery et al. (2019), which proposed the existence of eight urban patterns. We first show that the systemic analysis demonstrates that different groups of factors characterize each urban pattern. We also show the advantages of a multiple factors analysis in the study of the city structure of São Paulo. In a second study, we applied the systemic approach with the inclusion of covid-19 cases and deaths in the data. The results show that the pandemic led to higher lethality in regions with urban patterns coinciding with lower levels of education and income, a higher number of trips to work, and failures in the water supply system. We conclude that dealing with São Paulo’s vulnerability to extreme events, such as the covid-19 pandemic, demands the application of systemic public policies. We suggest that this might be the moment to adapt the city’s governance to urban patterns, as opposed to the traditional political-administrative approach.

KEYWORDS:
Covid-19; Systemic management; São Paulo; Public policies