Alliance against COVID-19
Fighting the virus and disease, detecting infection and the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on society are issues being explored at Heidelberg University from different disciplinary perspectives. In order to drive the fight against the coronavirus and COVID-19 in a joint alliance, scientists from Heidelberg University have joined with external partners to form the research and development task force fightCOVID@Heidelberg. The task force relies on an interdisciplinary research network that covers the entire breadth of fundamental life sciences and medical research and bridges the gap to clinical applications.
Scientists from the four university hospitals of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Tübingen and Ulm conducted a cross-institutional COVID-19 children’s study on current or past SARS-CoV-2 infections in children and one of their parents. In a follow-up project the transmission of COVID-19 will now be examined in households with children and young people. The question here is how the coronavirus spreads when at least one person has been infected with it.
How the population perceives and copes with measures to combat the coronavirus was the topic of an online survey of a group of around 1,300 participants representative of the population by gender, age and education. It is part of an interdisciplinary project at Heidelberg University’s Marsilius Kolleg on the topic of “Social Self-Empowerment”. Initial survey results have already been made public. The societal effects of a pandemic that is unprecedented in living memory are the subject of several individual studies at Heidelberg University, especially in the field of psychology. Among other things, these studies investigate stress and stress factors in various occupational groups such as the police, questions of emotion regulation in times of contact restrictions and social distancing rules or changes in the way we work, such as working from home and the necessity of improvising digital work processes.
The studies are presented on an overview page: Fighting Coronavirus and COVID-19
