Abstract
Since January 2020, the world has been experiencing an unprecedented health crisis, after the World Health Organization declared the Public Health Emergency of International Importance as a surveillance strategy and immediate response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Brazil, the economic and political chaos resulting from the 2016 coup d’état deepened the pandemic crisis, exposing the gap in social inequalities and, in particular, health inequalities, and the neglect of life in all its dimensions. This reflection brings to the scene conjunctural elements (economic-political and socio-environmental) necessary for the understanding of technical surveillance interventions, with emphasis on quarantine and social isolation, as emergency normative strategies for individual and collective life, used to control bodies and places. In this catastrophic scenario, vulnerable territories are doubly penalized, for their peripheral condition in the space of cities and for their systematic exclusion of citizenship rights, requiring, from governments, interventions that consider the continental dimension and the country’s economic-cultural heterogeneity; social and health inequalities; and the ability to respond in a timely manner to each sphere of management that is the exclusive responsibility of the State, within the scope of Health Surveillance, Specialized Assistance and Primary Health Care in the Unified Health System.
health surveillance; quarantine; social isolation; territory; health control