Hedra EU
According to the Wikipedia, a (public) health crisis is
a difficult situation or complex health system that affects humans in one or more geographic areas (mainly occurred in natural hazards), from a particular locality to encompass the entire planet. Health crises generally have significant impacts on community health, loss of life, and on the economy. They may result from disease, industrial processes or poor policy.[1][2]
Its severity is often measured by the number of people affected by its geographical extent, or the disease or death of the pathogenic process which it originates.
A health crisis will become manifest as instances forming a pattern. At what point such a pattern is recognized as a health crisis will depend on various factors, clearly including how fast the changes leading to the pattern take place. Slow changes are harder to detect than rapid ones — until they lead to a tipping point. And it is likely to take time to determine how systemic the pattern is — whether it is more like a blip in the system or actually represents a long-term change in the system. The challenge of interpretation is familiar from the extended debates about emergent weather patterns — whether they are to be interpreted as short-term perturbations or, as is now generally recognized as a long-term change in the system, i.e. in the climate, manifested e.g. as global warming.
The challenge of locating patterns in health along the cline of instantiation between apparently local short-term occurrences and longer-term changes in the system is one aspect of the complexity of a health crisis. Another is that it is systemically complex: while it is a crisis in biological systems in an ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms, it is at the same time also a social crisis, e.g. putting pressure on institutions of healthcare and related institutions such as education, and a semiotic crisis, a crisis in systems of meaning (“communication”), e.g. putting pressure on reporting information about the social and biological issues — recounting what has happened, monitoring what is happening, and forecasting what will or may happen. Since biological systems are manifested as physical systems, it is also a physical crisis. So a health crisis is complex because it is not only biological, but also physical, social and semiotic; and all these orders are involved in detection, diagnosis and treatment.
Semiotically, there are many challenges associated with a health crisis. As it emerges, it must be detected and interpreted as a crisis, information must be disseminated, responses worked out, evaluated and debated, and so on. It is thus a crisis in the creation, dissemination and evaluation of meaning. The current “semiotic revolution” — a conceptualization of the “information age” and “knowledge societies” — means that the volume of information being produced is huge and thus hard to manage. There are computational tools for detecting, monitoring and possibly even forecasting semiotic trends — patterns in meaning, and their output is important and interesting to examine. But at the same time, the validity of information about a health crisis can become a serious issue, including competing “narratives” and other forms of contestation.