Communication

ECDC published 209 scientific publications, including rapid risk assessments and regular surveillance reports. The newsletter had 5630 subscribers in 2020, which is 1413 more than the previous year.

The Centre is increasingly publishing data, graphs, maps and infographics as downloadable, copyright-free assets to allow partners and stakeholders to reuse ECDC content. For instance, Website’s traffic peaked in March, when more that 8 million page-views were recorded in one month.

Since 22 January, the daily COVID-19 situation updates pages have been the most popular pages on the ECDC website. As mandated by Council Recommendation of 7 December 2018 on strengthened cooperation against vaccine-preventable diseases reason, ECDC launched the European Vaccination Information Portal (EVIP) in April 2020 as a cross-agency/EU project, ‘An initiative of the EU’. It was developed in close collaboration with the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The social media team saw an unprecedented increase in traffic, as did the info mailbox managers.

The Centre also intensified its work with health journalists. In close cooperation with the European Commission, the Health Security Committee, and the WHO Regional Office for Europe, ECDC provided EU-wide communication response to public health issues. The number of requests in 2020 from various media sources totalled 1917. The requests came from a wide range of sources, from major international news outlets and wire agencies to fact-checking organisations. Geographically, 1690 requests originated in Europe.

On World Tuberculosis Day, World Hepatitis Day and World AIDS Day, ECDC used the opportunity to inform interested public and technical experts alike about the work in the respective areas. As in previous years, ECDC, in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe published joint enhanced surveillance reports on tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, regular influenza updates and a joint press release with WHO prior to the World AIDS Day.

In response to a request by the Commissioner Health and Food Safety, ECDC developed a new output, the weekly COVID-19 policy brief to present short and easy-to-read analysis of key indicators, trends and developments of the COVID-19 pandemic in the EU/EEA, for use by the Commissioner’s Cabinet. Along with latest epidemiological trends, the policy brief informs the Commissioner about the latest outputs by ECDC, with a particular focus on policy implications.