Between Care and Cure: Volunteers facing Covid-19 in Senegal
This research aims to contribute to an anthropological analysis of the engagement of local volunteers in the face of Covid-19. It aims to describe and analyze the practical, subjective and contextualized experience that volunteers have of implementing the confinement of confirmed asymptomatic subjects on dedicated extra-hospital sites. It will thus show how volunteers contribute to this response to Covid-19 and how Covid-19 affects their engagement.
Studying an exceptional measure: the confinement of confirmed asymptomatic subjects (SCA) on extra-hospital sites
Senegal recorded its first case of Covid on March 2, 2020. Following WHO standards, the implementation of isolation measures for contact or confirmed subjects was organized, particularly around contamination clusters. Structures were set up to accommodate confirmed asymptomatic subjects (SCA), with a medical team to provide appropriate care. This outsourcing of care aims to decongest hospitals and ensure continuity of care for other diseases. While preventive confinement is an old and ordinary public health measure in times of epidemics, the confinement of SCAs on extra-hospital sites is an unprecedented measure. This measure requires the application of hygiene and precautionary measures and daily logistical management which are, in Senegal, the responsibility of local volunteers. “Front-line actors in the face of the epidemic”, these volunteers are nevertheless little recognized. Their contribution to the response to epidemics is little studied, and is even less so in the context of West Africa. This research thus aims to describe and analyze the practical, subjective and contextualized experience that volunteers have of the implementation of SCA confinement on dedicated extra-hospital sites.
Feeding research on volunteer participation in the national response to the epidemic
The social history of recent epidemics in West Africa teaches the need to combine a community approach with public health measures to ensure effective responses to epidemics. The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic of 2013-2016 was partly controlled thanks to the involvement on the ground of volunteers from communities who played a key role at the interface between health services and populations. For example, they made acceptable measures as unpopular as the management of dignified and secure burials in Guinea. However, while the Covid-19 pandemic has been raging in West Africa since the end of February 2020, the expertise of community actors is insufficiently taken into account in the response.
By providing detailed knowledge of the involvement of volunteers in the response to Covid-19 focused on the implementation of the confinement of SCAs, this research will contribute to discussions on the participation of volunteers in the national response to the epidemic, on the one hand, and on containment measures beyond the Covid-19 epidemic, on the other hand.
Biography
Séverine Carillon is an anthropologist, contract researcher at CEPED, a Joint Research Unit associating the University of Paris and the Institute of Research for Development (IRD). Her research focuses on issues of health and precariousness, on access to care and treatment for vulnerable populations, particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS, in France and West Africa.