With the COVID-19, health professionals had to adopt coping strategies to deal with the stress caused by the pandemic. The objective was to evaluate the coping strategies used by health professionals from the 52 Health Units in the city at the beginning of the pandemic. This is a crosssectional observational study of a quantitative nature, in which 2 self-administered questionnaires were used: 1) on sociodemographic data consisting of 8 open questions: age, profession, time in public service, education, risk group, sex, marital status and number of children and 2) the Coping Inventory by Folkman and Lázarus (1985) containing 66 questions representing specific actions or thoughts used in a stressful situation. 198 health professionals participated in this research, after signing the free and informed consent form, in which 90.9% of the sample was female; 26.8% were in the risk group; 49% had up to the second level of schooling. The predominant professional category in the study was health agents with 49.2%, followed by nursing assistants (16%), nurses (14%), physicians (8.3%), dentists (6.8%), assistants oral health (4.7%). The most used coping strategy was positive reappraisal (0.749), followed by problem solving (0.692). As for the risk group, escape-avoidance was the most used form of coping (0.806). Discussion: There have been few studies regarding stress in primary care health professionals to date. This study, like others in the context of the 2019 pandemic, showed that positive reassessment, problem solving and the search for social support were the strategies most used by health professionals and women were the most affected because they are the majority active in the area of health. Conclusion: It was found that health professionals mainly used positive reassessment and problem solving as ways of coping and that measures are needed to offer better working conditions, training and appreciation of these professionals

Aline Rezende is a psychologist and specialist in Transactional Analysis and also has a degree in Economics. She has worked as a social psychologist, but currently works in the clinical area and is a PhD student in Public Health at UNICAMP University, Brazil.