ECDC website

Our work in 2020 /

2020 in brief

Work on the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most extensive Public Health Event (PHE) ECDC has had to respond to since the Centre became operational in 2005. In 2020, supporting the EU COVID-19 response became indeed the dominant activity of the Centre.

Following initial information about several cases of pneumonia of unknown origin detected in the city of Wuhan in China, ECDC activated its Public Health Event (PHE) plan to level 0 phase 1 (alert mode) from 9 to 15 January, moving to PHE level 1 on 21 January and to PHE level 2 on 30 January. Since then, the maximum level of alert has been maintained.

Moreover, on 18 March 2020, the COVID-19 support group was created to better manage the number of experts working on COVID-19 response, and on 14 September 2020 a new Disease Programme for COVID-19 was established, addressing the need to integrate the COVID activities into ECDC long-term processes.

ECDC’s response consisted of five groups of activities:

  • Surveillance and epidemic intelligence (epidemiological monitoring);
  • Scientific and technical guidance for decision making (production of rapid risk assessments, scientific studies, etc.):
  • Enabling networking across Europe;
  • Dissemination of evidence-based information;
  • Vaccine strategy support to the European Commission and Members States COVID-19 vaccine strategy.
colleagues having a meeting

The Centre worked on establishing fit-for-purpose surveillance in countries and at the EU level to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for routine surveillance of the disease. It provided high-quality, up-to-date, and consolidated evidence to Member States and the Commission through planned outputs, or in response to stakeholders’ requests. The Centre assisted the European Commission and Member States also with laboratory-related support and expanded testing, contributed to strengthening Member States preparedness by establishing operational indicators and supported the assessment of health services surge capacity.

ECDC was particularly active in producing short- and longer-term COVID-19-related forecasts. For instance, in May 2020, the Centre produced a set of short-term forecasts of the expected number of COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalised cases (subdivided into general hospital wards and intensive care units).

Alongside the planned work, the Public Health Event roster – in which over 100 ECDC staff members were directly involved – produced 24 COVID-19 related risk assessments and responded to an exceptionally high number of requests from stakeholders (European Commission, Member States, and the media).

In September, in response to a request by the Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, ECDC started delivering weekly COVID-19 policy briefs. Few weeks later, ECDC developed a weekly publication of an EU Member State map, showing the risk levels across the regions in Europe using a traffic light system.

Towards the end of 2020, ECDC provided effective support to vaccination strategies-related work at EU and Member State level. At the same time, the Centre actively contributed to the assessment of the recent emergence of COVID-19 variants of potential concern.