Clinical Aspects thematic project (A)"COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA" approved

The NPA Programme Secretariat approved the Clinical Aspects thematic project (A) " Local, national and transnational public health responses and comparative clinical data across the NPA region: COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA” led by University of Limerick, Ireland with three other partners: University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway Norwegian Institute of Public Health; Akureyri Hospital, Iceland; and Lakehead University, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Canada.

Associated partners include University of Eastern Finland, Finland; Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK; NHS Highland, Scotland, UK and University of New England, Maine, USA.

The first objective of any response to this pandemic must be to protect lives, this is vital in order to minimise further collateral damage from COVID-19 for individuals and populations, according to the project consortium.

The collaborative transnational data collection infrastructure COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA will deliver crucially important to inform countries and regions as they try to navigate their way through the lifting of restrictions in the next phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through a collaboration with clinical teams across the NPA region, the “COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA” project will provide regular updated comparative data with clinical interpretation between those NPA and non-NPA regions on a country by country basis. The project will also retrospectively map the public health responses and interventions used by different NPA regions and countries in the first wave of the COVID-19 and explore how these measures have influenced the individual pandemic curves of these countries: COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA RESPONSE, and share COVIDWATCH-EU-NPA report.