Our lab is participating in the PERISCOPE H2020 project, a partnership of 30+ top European universities and associations of professionals worked together for the last two years to study data, policies, actions, and effects of pandemic management. Besides the high-impact research results, the consortium worked on implementing educational materials and courses.
“One Health: pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response”, produced by the Karolinska Institutet and the Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM).
“Strengthening territorial response for better health”, realised by the European Regional and Local Health Authorities (EUREGHA), Mental Health Europe (MHE), and Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya (AQuAS).
Despite the increasing limitations for unvaccinated people, in many European countries, there is still a non-negligible fraction of individuals who refuse to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, undermining governmental efforts to eradicate the virus.
Within the PERISCOPE project, we studied the role of online social media in influencing individuals’ opinions about getting vaccinated by designing a large-scale collection of Twitter messages in three different languages — French, German, and Italian — and providing public access to the data collected. This work was implemented in collaboration with Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.
Focusing on the European context, we devised an open dataset called VaccinEU, that aims to help researchers to better understand the impact of online (mis)information about vaccines and design more accurate communication strategies to maximize vaccination coverage.
The dataset is openly accessible in a Dataverse repository and a GitHub repository.
Furthermore, a description has been published in a paper at ICWSM 2022 (open access), which can be cited as:
Di Giovanni, M., Pierri, F., Torres-Lugo, C., & Brambilla, M. (2022). VaccinEU: COVID-19 Vaccine Conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 16(1), 1236-1244. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19374
PERISCOPE (“Pan-European Response to the Impacts of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics”) is a large-scale project that aims at mapping and analysing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing solutions and guidance for policymakers and health authorities on how to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, and enhancing Europe’s preparedness for future similar events. We plan to promote science-based policies for the post-pandemic society, in a way that orients future recovery towards enhanced resilience and sustainability. PERISCOPE is funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme for research and innovation, for the period November 2020-October 2023.
In our three-year journey, we plan to continuously collect good practices and innovative solutions that have proven effective in the containment of the pandemic, in the protection of the economy and society, in the management and organisation of healthcare facilities, or in the mitigation of indirect effects of the restrictions adopted throughout Europe, including mental health and inequalities. From the reorganisation of hospitals to the use of technology in social distancing and contact tracing, to innovative modes of disbursing funds to citizens and businesses, we commit to keeping our eyes open to all successful applications or solutions that could potentially be emulated in other parts of Europe, or inspire socially beneficial innovation.
We are launching a call for good practices directed at public authorities, businesses, civil society, academics from all over Europe and beyond, in order to identify solutions implemented during 2020, which proved useful and effective in achieving their intended objectives. We only ask respondents to provide us with a very short description, help us classify the good practices according to the categories specified below, and possibly be available for further clarifications in case we need important information. We at PERISCOPE will do the rest. We will analyse the proposed practice and evaluate its transferability to other parts of the European territory, and identify good practices to be promoted throughout Europe.
The areas of interest in our collection of good practices include: Education and training: (for example, modes of distance learning, organising student rotations at school, training teachers on online tools, training healthcare professionals, etc.); use of digital technologies (e.g. contact-tracing apps; use of data from mobile operators or tech platforms; crowdsourcing solutions; use of Artificial Intelligence in testing and tracing; etc.); financial aid to citizens and businesses (direct payments, access to subsidies, rating resilience or sustainability of recipients of funds); reorganisation of hospital and intensive care facilities; transportation and logistics; and more.
The first cut-off date for submitting good practices is December 31, 2020. After that date, we will compile a first report and publish it on our website, on the press and in scientific articles. By contributing valuable experience, you can help us learn and transfer practices that can save lives and improve individual well-being in Europe and beyond.
Marco Brambilla 