The BY-COVID Baseline Use Case is part of the project’s ‘Continuously evolving demonstrator’, which is a set of use cases aiming to demonstrate how to respond and adapt to research challenges arising from a pandemic, by mobilising data from various research domains, sources, and countries. The Baseline Use Case aims to investigate the effectiveness of primary vaccination in preventing different outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2, by conducting federated analyses of existing real-world observational data in 7 European countries that act as Data Nodes in the Baseline Use Case (for more information, please refer to its Study Protocol).
On the 26th of April representatives from 13 Dutch and Belgian organisations both internal and external to the project gathered at the NWO premises in The Hague, to discuss how socioeconomic data can contribute to the current investigation on vaccine effectiveness, related research, and opportunities and bottlenecks.
The workshop aimed to familiarise the participants with the project and relevant initiatives, and in particular, to discuss issues surrounding socioeconomic data requirements, mobilisation, and protection in different national contexts. The workshop participants had the opportunity to further discuss in interactive workshop sessions on topics surrounding the Dutch-Belgian landscape, socioeconomic factors and data sources, multidisciplinarity, cross-fertilisation and reproducibility. The half-day event also featured presentations on the DANS Data Station Social sciences and Humanities, the BY-COVID Baseline Use Case, the ODISSEI portal, the Data landscape for infectious diseases surveillance in Belgium and use of socioeconomic indicators, and the Health-RI COVID19 project.
The workshop was well-received and productive. The upcoming workshop report will include the input of the workshop participants and other community members, and it will be further available for public comments. The end goal is for the results of the workshop and following input to contribute greatly to the continued development of the BY-COVID Baseline Use Case.
This workshop had a regional focus on the Netherlands and Belgium and featured a diverse set of representatives from RIVM, Sciensano, Amsterdam UMC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Health-RI, IACS, Lygature, ODISSEI, SHARE Belgium, the University of Antwerp, ZonMw and DANS. A workshop report with the contribution of invited participants is currently being produced and will include takeaways from the workshop. The report as well as slides from the workshop presentations will be published on the BY-COVID Zenodo Community in the near future.
About BY-COVID
BY-COVID aims to make data on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases from various disciplines available to the public, in order to improve European readiness for future pandemics. This three-year project involves 53 partners from 19 countries, and brings together stakeholders from a variety of different disciplines and backgrounds, including from the biomedical field, hospitals, public health, as well as the social sciences and humanities.
DANS participates in the project as a member of CESSDA, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives. As such, DANS mainly contributes with expertise and resources related to the social sciences, in the BY-COVID Baseline Use Case, and in the training activities of the project (for more details on DANS’ involvement in BY-COVID, see this link).
More information
BY-COVID project
COVID-19 Data Portal
BY-COVID Baseline Use Case materials:
BY-COVID is a project funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement number 101046203.
