Periscope - a Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics
Periscope is a large-scale research project that involves a consortium of 32 European institutions to investigate the implications of COVID-19 in a broad way, which include the socio-economic impacts, the health impacts and the impacts on the health systems.
Periscope is a Horizon 2020 research project, funded with almost 10 MEUR under the Coronavirus Global Response initiative launched in May 2020 by the European Commission.
This project aims to understand the social, economic, behavioural and mental health-related aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the ultimate aim to develop solutions and provide policy guidance to prepare Europe for future large-scale epidemic outbreaks.
Karolinska Institutet is the lead of the project work with mental health impacts and focuses on exploring levels of mental health and service consumption across EU-countries.
The main goals of Periscope:
- To gather data on the broad impacts of COVID-19 in order to develop a comprehensive, user-friendly, openly accessible COVID Atlas, which should become a reference tool for researchers and policymakers, and a dynamic source of information to disseminate to the general public;
- To perform innovative statistical analysis on the collected data, with the help of various methods including machine learning tools;
- To identify successful practices and approaches adopted at the local level, which could be scaled up at the pan-European level for a better containment of the pandemic and its related socio-economic impacts; and
- To develop guidance for policymakers at all levels of government, in order to enhance Europe’s preparedness for future similar events and proposed reforms in the multi-level governance of health.
Periscope at Karolinska Institutet
Karolinska Institutet is the lead of the project work with mental health impacts and is focusing on exploring levels of mental health and service consumption across EU-countries.
We are mapping changes in levels of self-reported mental health problems and mental health care utilisation over time in relation to policies (e.g. lock downs),”Covid-load” and socioeconomic factors in different countries and regions. Furthermore we are investigating mental health in vulnerable groups by looking at changes of utilisation of mental health care over time among migrants, refugees and homeless people compared to the general population.
Research questions
- How is the wellbeing and mental health of the general population affected by covid-19 regulations , economic instability and Covid-load in the wake of the pandemic?
- Are vulnerable groups particularly affected?
- How do these secondary consequences of the corona pandemic effect the mental health of citizens of European regions differently?
The Covid Atlas
One of the main outcomes of this project is the PERISCOPE Atlas: an interactive tool that allows to visualize and analyze COVID-19-related health, economic and sociopolitical data. KI is one of the partners that have been feeding collected data into the Atlas. The Atlas is already available and open-access and can be found here: https://periscopeproject.eu/covid-atlas
Reports and publications within Periscope at KI
Periscope
Overall budget: € 9 993 475
Project coordinator: the University of Pavia (Italy)
Project dates: 1 November 2020 - 31 October 2023
Funded under:
- H2020-EU.3.1.1.
- H2020-EU.3.6.1.
Grant agreement ID: 101016233
Webbpage: https://periscopeproject.eu/home