Throughout the pandemic, we took considerable efforts to explain to a wide audience how SARS-CoV-2 evolves and its potential implications for pandemic management strategies and vaccines. This led to eight live webinars, some dedicated to non-German speakers.
Throughout the pandemic, we took considerable efforts to explain to a wide audience how SARS-CoV-2 evolves and its potential implications for pandemic management strategies and vaccines. This includes a dedicated project website with explanations of our work and tools such as Nextstrain Austria, social media and podcast activities, >80 presentations to diverse lay and scientific audiences and 980 interviews for national and international print and TV media in 2020-2022. A. Bergthaler pursues long-term interests in science communication within high schools. During the pandemic, he was involved in several workshops with high school and university students (e.g. at the International Academy Traunkirchen). In addition, together with the Austrian Red Cross, A. Bergthaler co-initiated and moderated the Live webinar series #BreakingtheWave targeting pupils, parents and teachers (https://www.gemeinsamlesen.at/corona). This led to eight live webinars about the pandemic and the use of vaccines together with expert panels from medicine, epidemiology, education and journalism from November 2021 to January 2022. Of note, this included dedicated webinars for non-German speakers in Arabic, Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian and Turkish language. These #BreakingtheWave webinars reached >12.000 pupils live as well as a wider audience through the recorded webinars on Youtube / Facebook and extended media coverage.