ENGINEERINGNET.BE – During the corona crisis, epidemiologists and biostatisticians from many different countries worked on models to better estimate the spread of the infectious disease and to advise governments as best as possible on measures to be taken.
“With ESCAPE, we want to bundle the knowledge we have gained in order to respond even better and faster in the future to a new major infectious disease,” says Prof. Dr. Niel Hens, affiliated with UHasselt and UAntwerp, and coordinator of ESCAPE.
Scientists from Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland will translate the lessons learned from the corona crisis into scenarios over the next four years.
“During the corona pandemic, for example, we saw that better and faster data exchange between scientists worldwide is crucial. Within ESCAPE we want to work on a more uniform way of collecting data, with an eye for privacy and data protection,” says Dr. Lisa Hermans (UHasselt).
“If we make agreements in advance about how we can and want to share crucial data better within and across national borders, we lose much less time when the need is greatest. In this way, important decisions can be made more quickly.”
The researchers within ESCAPE also want to gain even better insight into how infectious diseases mutate. “Again, responding quickly and accurately is crucial, as the coronavirus, with its many mutations, clearly showed us,” says Hens.
“ESCAPE therefore brings together the expertise of scientists who are analyzing genome sequences of viruses, in order to find out how we can collect these genome sequences more efficiently in order to gain a better understanding of the distribution of variants, for example.”
Partners in Escape are: UAntwerp, INSERM (France), INSA (Portugal), RIVM (Netherlands), ISI foundation (Italy), LSHTM (UK) and UBern (Switzerland).
