HERoS' overall objective is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak. HERoS provides policies and guidelines for improved crisis governance, focusing on responders to public health emergencies, and their needs to make informed decisions.
HERoS' objectives are to
- extract, understand and model different co-ordination structures and governance arrangements, determine bottlenecks and develop policies and procedures for efficient information-sharing,
- improve the predictions of the spread by understanding and modelling the impact of local behaviour on the spread of the disease and provide policy advice that considers deep uncertainty,
- improve the management of medical supply chains,
- reduce the impacts of cascading effects across globalised supply chains,
- develop a new method to retrieve actionable information from social media and detect rumours and misinformation early, and to
- develop training modules for epidemics response and disseminate project results to build up a network of early adopters.
HERoS consists of three phases:
1. "Rapid Response" (M1-M6) focuses on crucial aspects of pandemic response. It includes an analysis of governance arrangements in the ongoing COVID-19 response in situ, local behavioural epi-spread models, a gap analysis to secure medical supplies, and COVID-19 misinformation spread analysis.
2. "Evaluation, research & innovation" (M7-30) focuses on lessons learned, changing workflows and methods, fine-tuned behavioural epidemiological models, secure deliveries, and explainability methods on COVID-19 misinformation.
3. "Training and dissemination" combines lessons learned across different aspects of the project, and develops training modules.
This is third and final periodic report of the project, which finishes the "Evaluation, research and innovation" phase as well as the "Training and dissemination" phase.
