Co2Lab, Coronavirus Community Lab
Do you want to help improve Coronavirus crisis management in your environment? Become a change agent to help your community! A proposal from EduCaixa and the Living Lab for Health at IrsiCaixa for families and adults, participants aged 14-18, and teachers.
We are living through an exceptional situation as we face the spread of the Coronavirus. The World Health Organization has declared that we are facing a global pandemic. The scientific community is working every day to learn more about the virus, possible vaccines or treatments, and crisis management strategies, but at this time we do not have enough information to draw definitive conclusions.
Governments have declared a state of emergency to address this situation, which requires strict compliance with special measures. These measures include home confinement for the majority of the population, who can only go out to purchase essential products such as medicine and food.
Citizens dedicated to providing sustenance and health care for the rest of the population can also leave their homes. In the event that we have to leave home, we must protect ourselves and others by following basic hygiene measures. It is essential we follow these general recommendations to avoid saturating the health system.
These recommendations apply to all citizens equally, but we may ask ourselves: Is it easy for everyone to follow these recommendations? What problems are they causing for citizens, in terms of their health, finances, social lives, etc.? Are we sufficiently informed? What solutions are being offered to deal with citizens’ different situations? Can our community contribute? How can we mobilise to help improve crisis management in our immediate environments?
The Coronavirus Community Lab is a proposal for everyone to mobilise and empower their community with knowledge and skills, to explore their particular situation together and to implement solutions aimed at improving community health in a broad sense: physical and mental health, socialisation, nutrition, rest, physical activity, etc.
It’s an opportunity to work together as researchers to explore our situation and help generate evidence-based proposals for change and improvement.
*Important note*: This resource has been devised for the Spanish context of the Coronavirus crisis. Therefore, the conditions of participation and awards described in the guidelines prevail only in Spain. However, the resource is open and available to anyone who is interested. Moreover, Section 2 contains information about the management of the health crisis in Spain. In order to make the most of this experience, we recommend you to adapt Section 2 and the bibliographic references to the situation and data of your country.
Basic information
This resource aims to give response to the Coronavirus crisis and has been devised by education specialists from the educational resource portal EduCaixa and from the research centre IrsiCaixa. Moreover, the content has been revised by biomedical researchers at IrsiCaixa and public health researchers at IDIAP Jordi Gol.
The resource encourages participants to develop participatory research, analyse the problems and needs of their community regarding the coronavirus crisis management, design an action plan and a proposal to help to improve the situation in their communities, and implement solutions.
Teaching materials: the proposal consists of a document called “Citizen science itinerary” which describes the guidelines to follow the proposal, and the “Working document”, an editable file where participants can do the different exercises and collect the information from their research.
Activities: the proposal is developed in three sections:
- SECTION 1. Getting informed and empowered to become change agents – The participants have to learn basic information about the pandemic (What are SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19? How do they affect us? What diagnosis and treatment methods are used? How is the pandemic evolving? What research is being done?) as well as to have criteria when selecting and disseminating information.
- SECTION 2. Strategies to end the pandemic: recommendations and analysis of problems and solutions – The participants will discover the strategies that are being carried out to end the pandemic in their country and in other countries and will analyse in depth the problems and solutions that arise from the management model of the Coronavirus crisis.
- SECTION 3. How can we contribute to improve the management of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic? – Finally, participants become change agents, analyse the problems of their community through research, and design proposals to help improve the management of the pandemic.