In a meeting on Monday, March 2020, 19, the rector of Unicamp, Marcelo Knobel, created a working group to discuss the university's preparation for the Covid-25 pandemic. The group met for the first time the following day and, before the end of that same week, Thursday, Unicamp interrupted its in-person activities. There were still 52 confirmed cases on the ninth, 178 that Thursday, more than XNUMX thousand exactly two months later. With face-to-face classes interrupted (practically all subjects continue to be offered in non-face-to-face formats), the university did not stop its research: the following week the Task force Unicamp against Covid-19, from professors at the Institute of Biology, proposing several fronts of action with researchers adapting their research projects to face the pandemic.
The initial results of this effort are already serving the population, as scientists quickly developed and validated a diagnostic test gold standard of the World Health Organization (WHO) to speed up testing of suspected patients arriving at the Unicamp health system. In a short time, the mark of 1000 tests carried out was surpassed. Another concern was urgent: the massification of tests requires imported inputs and the task force works on validating national inputs to overcome this dependence. But the results were not only achieved on this front: the devastating disease attacks far beyond the respiratory tract and a research group has identified its action on neurons, for example. Mathematicians and engineers pored over the numbers and models, creating projections that quickly became raise awareness among the population e inform the university’s actions quality public policies about the need for social isolation. The mobilization spread across the university's institutes, faculties and research centers, as the dimensions of the problem, which affect the human condition, are vast.
How to articulate these and other actions? Last week, Unicamp's Dean of Research sent a message to the university community asking about their interest in joining the task force and those interested could fill out a quick form, quickly describing the research or activity related to Covid-19. The response was immediate and task force website you can access some information about the 70 projects already registered.
The projects range from, naturally, biological sciences and health, to art history, including engineering, materials science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, education, demography and scientific dissemination. These are fronts searching for vaccines, developing clinical tests, observing drug interactions, investigating mechanisms of action of the virus in the human body; improving equipment; informing the public, seeking forms of teaching in different areas of knowledge, studying the record of that time; evaluating the effects of the pandemic on vulnerable situations, on children and adolescents; seeking improvements in patient conditions, among others. These are initiatives developed in 18 different faculties and institutes, in addition to seven interdisciplinary research centers and centers, involving more than 500 researchers including professors, researchers and students.
Some answers have already come, others will come soon and many will be useful to us in what follows after the pandemic.
