Research activities were greatly affected during the last 3 months because of COVID outbreak and RESTORE’s Consortium has briefly self-evaluated its impact on their research life. The survey was extended to all the Consortium’ partners coming from different Countries as summarized in Figure 1.
Even if only few institutions are located in the area with the most prevalence of COVID-19 (UPO-Northern Italy, University of Goteborg – Sweden), the most of RESTORE’s partners had restriction to work, starting from the middle and sometimes from the first week or the last week of March as schematized in Figure 2.
Someone has partially access to the laboratories but the most of the RESTORE’s researchers have no access at all for many weeks. In Figure 3 are reported results regarding the possibility of RESTORE’s partners to access laboratories during the lockdown period.
Despite the difficulties in carrying on research, many of the RESTORE’s researchers have been promptly committed in COVID research, capitalizing their own expertise: medical imaging and tissue analysis, design PCR primers for COVID-19 and identification of the patients’ immunological signature. Someone also actively served as “COVID-volunteer” as summarized in Figure 4.
COVID outbreak had many other bad consequences, even for the personal point of view. Even if no one of the RESTORE’s researchers have gotten sick because of COVID-19, many others belonging to the same institution have fallen ill as reported in Figure 5.
The lockdown is now ended in the most of RESTORE’s Countries, but restriction still run in Norway. RESTORE Consortium’s activities are slowly normalizing.
