Heros on emergency COVID-19 response

The overall objective of HERoS (Health Emergency Response In Interconnected Systems) is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak through research in four main areas: governance: HERoS creates and provides policies and guidelines for improved crisis governance, focusing on responders to public health emergencies, and their needs to make informed decisions.

The crux of understanding the COVID-19 outbreak is therefore in understanding and orchestrating the many direct and indirect feedbacks between local systems, interventions, and global impact across international supply chains.

As authorities and responders were struggling to contain the spread, news about mass quarantine camps or shortages of personal protective equipment threatened the health systems globally, fueled by rumors and mis-information. The disruptions of (medical) supply chains, the lack of capacity to treat patients and the spread of rumours fuel an atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust, hampering an effective response, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.

Therefore, HERoS (Health Emergency Response In Interconnected Systems) takes an integrated systems perspective that aims at understanding the impact of these measures from the bottom-up and orchestrates the response across hierarchical levels; sectors and countries. HERoS integrates behavioural dynamics in epidemiological models under the resource constraints of public health providers, and bringing together governance, information, and logistics support to prepare for and respond to the COVID-19 epidemic.

• HERoS further improves the predictions of the spread by understanding and modelling the impact of local behaviour on the spread of the disease
• HERoS improves the management of medical supply chains for preparedness and response, as well as evaluates the impact of cascading effects across global supply chains
• HERoS studies the co-spead of online misinformation and fact-checks

Multiple end users such as the Emergency Response Teams including Emergency Medical Teams (EMTs) of the Polish Centre for International Aid (PCPM), the Italian Red Cross (CRI), and Project Hope (HOPE) are directly engaged throughout this process, including a working group of early adopters.

HERoS is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the ‘SC1-PHE-CORONAVIRUS-2020 – Advancing knowledge for the clinical and public health response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic’ call. The research is being conducted between April 2020 and March 2023.

Objectives. The overall objective of HERoS is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the Covid19 outbreak. HERoS creates and provides policies and guidelines for improved crisis governance, with a core focus on responders to public health emergencies, and their needs to make informed decisions. This aim shall be achieved by enabling information-driven self-organisation and coordination that considers behaviour, as well as rapid adaptation to dynamically changing situations. To achieve this, HERoS will foster organizational and technical innovation during disasters for responders during critical scenarios from inaccurate, distrusted, and overhyped information. To this end, HERoS will provide them with accurate, validated, enriched, high quality, and actionable knowledge.