Multisystemic resilience to shocks: a temporal analysis of health, fundamental rights and freedoms, and economic resilience during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 22 European countries.

Objectives: Research on resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic has primarily focused on health system resilience. The purpose of this paper is to: (1) develop a broader understanding of societal resilience to shocks by evaluating resilience in three systems: health, economic and fundamental rights and freedoms and (2) to further operationalise resilience in terms of robustness, resistance and recovery.

Settings: 22 European countries were selected based on the availability of data in the health, fundamental rights and freedoms, and economic systems during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

Building a multisystemic understanding of societal resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current global systemic crisis reveals how globalised societies are unprepared to face a pandemic. Beyond the dramatic loss of human life, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered widespread disturbances in health, social, economic, environmental and governance systems in many countries across the world. Resilience describes the capacities of natural and human systems to prevent, react to and recover from shocks.