How should Austria handle pandemics?

Medicine & Science How would the pandemic in Austria have progressed if some decisions had been made differently - and above all, what can we do better in the future? The Medical University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Continuing Education Krems are involved. For this purpose, experts from different fields as well as laypersons will be asked for their opinions and hypothetical scenarios with stricter or less strict pandemic measures will be modelled. Linked to international evaluations and further developments, BETTER aims to help learn from the pandemic in the best possible way. Conditions that were considered unimaginable until the outbreak of the pandemic were in part decided from one day to the next (lockdowns, school closures, recommendation for home office, etc. Suddenly, society, politics and science found themselves in a completely new situation between discovering solutions as quickly as possible (adopting new patterns of action, developing vaccines, simulating and analysing pandemic mechanisms, assessing follow-up costs) and maintaining established control mechanisms (quality assurance by publishing the results). At the same time, science was catapulted into the media spotlight and was asked for information and assessments by policy makers more frequently than ever before. These processes are currently the subject of intense political, scientific and media debate.