COVINFORM - Guidance and recommendations for government and policy summary report
Creators: name: Bagkatzounis, Ioannis
name: Tsekoura, Anna
name: Konstantopoulos, Ioannis
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This report builds on the outcomes and insights of WP4, in order to develop guidance and recommendation for government responses, based on a critical review and cross-country analysis, lessons learned, and recommendations. D8.3 incorporates data from the desktop-research, residents’ interviews, the expert interviews, and the case studies that take into account the lived experience of vulnerable residents. The guidance and recommendations will include: 1) a critical review of pandemic plans and 2) recommendations for protocols and principles for decision-makers taking the lead in implementing pandemic measures. The repertoire of lessons learned and guidance will be in a form that can help planners understand how different lessons from other regions might be applicable to them. The D4.1 Baseline report: Governmental responses, focuses on the governmental responses towards COVID-19, based on a large desktop research conducted by the consortium partners among their fourteen respective countries. It summarized and assessed the responses per country, in terms of governmental structures, social, legal, cultural, and economic factors, that influence the governmental measures and responses towards COVID-19, and the adaptations to vulnerable groups as well media representation. The D4.2 Research design: Governmental responses, focused on the methodological development of research activities aimed at reviewing governmental structures and responses on a national level among the project target countries, as well as on a regional/local level in selected sub national research sites and case studies, and by performing in parallel an in-depth analysis of key dimensions of governmental response impact in the project target countries. Specifically, the main objective was to specify the research questions and methods of primary data collection and analysis that would be utilized on the empirical research on governmental responses and the impacts these have on the target countries and to specific vulnerable populations. The D4.3 Analysis: Government responses to COVID-19 and impact assessment, focused on describing and assessing government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the following five dimensions: Pandemic planning and preparedness, Governmental approaches to defining and addressing vulnerability, Responses on multiple levels of governance, Economic and social welfare responses, Socio-political, legal, and ethical factors influencing government preparedness and response. Data, including those from previously published COVINFORM reports, complement and enriched primary data. The D4.4 Synthesis and lessons learnt on governmental responses and impacts, focused on the data drawn from the empirical and desktop research, by conducting an interpretation of the analysis between the governmental structure per country and adaptations for COVID-19: as of January 2020 until March 2021 and as of March 2021 until April 2022. It concluded with several recommendations based on the analysis of the available data. The D4.5 Baseline report: Governmental responses – Update, as an update of the D4.1, focused on narrowing down the research, since the vast majority of the targeted countries adopted quite similar approaches in regard to governmental structures, laws and regulations, measures for vulnerable groups, crisis communication responses etc., and after presenting and comparing updates on governmental responses, attention was put on risk perceptions and vaccination initiatives and assessment. The D4.6 Research design: Governmental responses - update M26, was the second iteration of the methodological development in WP4. The D4.7 Analysis: Government responses to COVID-19 and impact assessment - update M32, as an update of the D4.3, focused on the following five dimensions of government response: Pandemic planning and preparedness, Economic and social welfare responses to COVID-19, COVID-19 responses on multiple levels of governance, Socio-political, legal, and ethical factors influencing government preparedness and response, Governmental approaches to defining and addressing vulnerability. In order to explore the government responses overtime, the following time points were considered: T0: Baseline pre-COVID-19 pandemic up until January 2020, T1: COVID-19 beginning and first lockdown until vaccination influenced measures, T2: Omicron until now (November 2021) up until September 2022. Finally, the D4.8 Synthesis and lessons learnt on governmental responses and impacts - update M33, focused on synthesizing data that is drawn from WP4 desktop and empirical research, with the synthesis of the governmental responses, impacts and subsequently the documentation of lessons learned, to be achieved by interpreting the analysis of governmental responses, structural alterations and studying the evolution of policies and practices. It has to be noted that throughout the Deliverables 4.1 to 4.8 there has been baseline and empirical research, with some of them being interconnected with each other.