*1.1. COVID-19 Pandemic and Vulnerable Populations*

A viral outbreak of an unknown coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. The increasing rate of incidence and mortality from the associated disease (COVID-19) challenged and stressed healthcare institutions and the global economy and had an impact on the physical and mental health of people around the world. The effects of this pandemic forced the adoption of drastic collective prevention measures throughout the world. In Spain, a state of alarm was decreed, followed by a series of agreements and resolutions on preventive measures

**Citation:** López-Ventoso, M.; Pisano González, M.; Fernández García, C.; Diez Valcarce, I.; Rey Hidalgo, I.; Rodríguez Nachón, M.J.; Menéndez García, A.M.; Perello, M.; Avagnina, B.; Zanutto, O.; et al. Understanding COVID: Collaborative Government Campaign for Citizen Digital Health Literacy in the COVID-19 Pandemic. *Life* **2023**, *13*, 589. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/life13020589

Academic Editor: Daniele Giansanti

Received: 2 January 2023 Revised: 14 February 2023 Accepted: 17 February 2023 Published: 20 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

and recommendations related to SARS-CoV-2 infection [1], which broke into the normal organization of administrations and the population. Collective confinement stands out among all measures adopted and how it profoundly transformed the general way of living and how to act and confront COVID-19.

As the pandemic evolved, the natural history of COVID-19 and its comprehension suffered great advances. From the beginning, it was suspected that the burden of disease between urban and rural areas could be different [2]. According to Lakhani and colleagues, once the virus entered a rural community, there was a higher relative rate of morbidity and mortality [3]. These higher rates would go unnoticed if specific epidemiological monitoring were not carried out in rural areas, given that the population impact is low because they represent a low percentage of the total population [4]. In addition, the rural environment is characterized by inequity in access to health infrastructure, health literacy, preparation and adaptation for the pandemic, greater difficulties in changing social and/or work habits, and demographic aging that conditions high rates of physical frailty, morbidity and dependency [3,5].

Although the characteristics of the Spanish rural environment are not comparable to those of the aforementioned studies, in Spain, there was also concern about the epidemiological vulnerability of the rural population. This situation, together with the analysis presented, justified the need to adapt intervention strategies in the prevention and control of transmission in rural and aged areas. The rural population is the most vulnerable, but other existing vulnerable populations must be included in the prevention strategies as there is strong evidence about the different impacts of COVID-19 on other groups. Making a general health information approach expecting that the resulting information will be acceptable for different groups is not sufficient to achieve equity, and a multifaceted approach that reaches every group is therefore needed.
