Tove Fall, Professor in Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, shares the Swedish experience in collecting data during the COVID-19 pandemic. What role did digital solutions and collaboration between stakeholders play in it? Interviewed by Michele Calabrò, Policy Advisor, European Patients’ Forum, YFG Taskforce member.
The second episode of the YFG interview series focuses on European cooperation. Stefan Eichwalder, Head of department for DRG and health economics in the Federal Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection, Austria, shares his views with Young Gasteiners Olivia Biermann, PhD student at the Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and Miriam Reiss, Researcher at Department of Health Economics and Health Policy, Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Austria.
The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the globe, exposing more than ever the fragilities of our economic and health systems. Right from the start of the pandemic, all eyes were on the data. We were all counting infected people, the number of tests, the ventilator stocks and, alas, the increasing fatalities. But was that data reliable and comparable? Did data effectively guide individual and government action? How can we build a better ecosystem for managing data to support the fight against pandemics?
These were the questions raised in the “Unlocking the potential of data in light of early lessons from COVID-19” session during #EHFG2020, organized by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
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