SNSF president Matthias Egger advocates a 'digitised and efficient' system for tracing contacts
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More than 200 projects have been submitted since March 6 as part of the research programme launched by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) on coronavirus and its impact.
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“We have been able to finance 36 of them,” SNSF president Matthias Egger told Le Temps newspaper on Tuesday. He said all of the selected programmes, which cross many disciplines, had started.
“Furthermore, in May we launched a national research programme on Covid-19 on behalf of the government. The projects are very diverse, many of which obviously concern immunology or virology.”
Concrete applications
Egger is also a professor at the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern and hopes that the research “will soon be translated into concrete applications”.
To improve the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, Egger proposes setting up a state-of-the-art infectious disease surveillance system in Switzerland, “integrating clinical and biological information in real time”. He also advocates a “digitised and efficient” system for tracing contacts that is the same in all cantons.
As of Monday, there have been more than 34,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and 1,700 deaths.
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