COVID-19 preparedness in the north of Europe: A personal viewpoint

A frozen forest in Kuopio, Finland

Nordic societies, like their European counterparts, started the year unprepared for a global pandemic. But before 2020, Scandinavian countries have been working alongside other ELIXIR colleagues to strengthen data services and tools. Over the last months, many ELIXIR Nodes have shared how they have prepared and responded to the pandemic.

Juha Törnroos, Tools and Software team lead at ELIXIR Finland, decided to share a more personal perspective on COVID-19 preparedness in the north of Europe — a blog post.

ELIXIR supports the Nordic efforts with a sustainable federated infrastructure

Juha mentions the importance of ELIXIR in building the required infrastructure to support national researchers. ELIXIR has been working closely with the Nordic Nodes for many years with two cardinal points: the Federated EGA and the ELIXIR Cloud.

Securely sharing and managing sensitive human data has been a key component of the EU’s strategy to build a robust and healthy Europe. As Juha mentions in his blog, we can see these European efforts in other ELIXIR-coordinated projects, such as ELIXIR-CONVERGE, and at a more regional scale, with NeIC Tryggve or national instances of the COVID-19 Data Portal.

Fri 6 November 2020