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Last Aid courses (LAC) were introduced in 2015 in three countries (Norway, Germany and Denmark) to teach the public about palliative care. The main aims of LAC are to stimulate the public discussion about death, dying and palliative care and to enable people to participate in end-of-life care in the community. At present the International Last Aid working group includes members from 18 countries from Europe, Brazil and Australia. Usually LACs are held in a classroom setting with 6-20 participants and two facilitators. Initially the 2nd International Last aid Conference was planned in October 2020 in Maribor, Slovenia. When the pandemic struck this became impossible. To cope with the demanding challenges and the fact that physical group meetings and conferences became impossible in 2020 Last Aid International had to find ways of continuing the work. A taskforce on Online Last Aid Courses was established in Germany and LACs were held Online via different web based platforms. The 2nd International Last Aid Conference took place online with 174 delegates from 18 countries. The implications and effects of COVID-19 on the development of Last Aid International will be presented and discussed in detail.References: 1. Bollig G, Meyer S, Knopf B, Schmidt S, Bauer EH. First Experiences with Online Last Aid Courses for Public Palliative Care Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Healthcare (Basel). 2021 Feb 5;9(2):172. doi: 10.3390/healthcare9020172. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/9/2/172 2. Zelko E, Bollig G. Report from the 2. International LAST AID Conference Online—The social impact of palliative care, October 30 2020, Maribor, Slovenia. AIMS Medical Science 2021, Volume 8, Issue 1: 42-45. doi: 10.3934/medsci.2021005 https://www.aimspress.com/article/doi/10.3934/medsci.2021005

Location-aware, ubiquitous, social media have proved broad affordances which can impact their users' local community experience, sustaining and enhancing their tie to their community as a set of meaningful places and as a social and relational entity-that is, their self-in-community. Thus, when COVID-19-related restrictions have partially or totally hindered the opportunities for individuals to attend common places in their community and, more specifically, to keep in touch with their social meanings, these social media have represented reliable alternative strategies to do so. Our "Prospettive di Connessioni Urbane"(Perspectives of Urban Connections) project relied on Instagram with the aim to increase citizens' focus on and contact with local places and their social dimensions-even when their attendance was hindered by COVID-19-related restrictions. We provided an Instagram account as an outlet for citizens' photos highlighting how some places were linked to social dimensions for them and launched a hashtag which could make users feel part of a community and allow more visibility to the contents. Furthermore, the collected photos were also located on a virtual map, allowing citizens at large to take a virtual tour of their city and feel their social meanings even when they were hindered from doing it in person. These tools could provide social and community psychologists as well as designers with useful pieces of information to disentangle the patterns of the interplay between social media community-related uses and local community experience.

We model and simulate the COVID-19 infection andhealthcare dynamics in Denmark from the onset till March 5,2021. The simulation is matched and calibrated to hospitaland death data as well as antibody population measurement.In this work we focus on comparing the time evolution of theestimated infection level with the daily identified infected individuals based on the national testing and contact tracingprogram. We find that the national testing program on average identifies 1/3 of the infected individuals July 1, 2020 -March 5, 2021. Our investigations indicate the current program does not have a proper balance between random probing, focused contact tracing, and testing prioritization. Toomuch of the program operates as a semi-random daily sampling of part of the population. We propose a policy with afocus on local infection tracing and interventions.

This paper investigates how parents of children in primary school dealt with anxiety in the context of pandemic health risks during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Denmark, this group found itself at the frontline of the reopening after an early lock-down. Creches, kindergartens, and primaryschools were among the first societal institutions to reopen, with the youngest pupils in primary schools to return first. This had been discussed controversially among parents, and one day after the announcement of the reopening a Facebook group called “My child should not be a guinea pig for COVID-19” had emerged. In this paper, we are analyzing how these and other parents dealt with this situation, based on qualitative interviews with 30 key informants (parents and teachers) supplemented by a qualitative survey filled in by 31 parents, collected during the first re-opening phase (April – July2020). Our findings indicate several types of strategies of dealing with anxiety and risk, namely somethat involve trust (1), especially in schools and teachers, enabling the parents to overcome their anxiety related to sending their children back to school, and others, that are not primarily built on trust, but rather on ignoring the anxious “gut feeling” (2) and resisting strategies (3) either in an overt (openly criticizing the re-opening) or hidden (e.g. keeping the child home sick) way. As our sample included a group of asylum seekers, our findings also indicate that patterns of exclusion in the context of an universal welfare state and a society characterized by comparatively high equality might mean a limitation of possible strategies, as e.g. resisting strategies appeared to be out of reach for that particular group.

In a time when children’s use of digital media and technology has been contested and widely debated, changes to living circumstances during the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly turned these debates upside down. As schools and workplaces closed down, families had to balance remote work, education, entertainment, exercise, and social acquaintances from home and via digital technologies. This paper presents the results of a qualitative interview study with children and their parents carried out in relation to the first Danish lockdown in spring 2020. 20 children aged 3 to 12 were interviewed about their everyday lives, their digital habits, their social relations, and their general well-being during the lockdown. The interviews were carried out using online video conference software (e.g. Zoom), and the children had filled out so-called ‘time capsules’ where they could draw and write about their experiences beforehand. The project is part of a cross-European study. Results from the interview study points to significant differences between younger (up to 6-7 years old) and older (8 years and up) children. Young children had little contact with other children and were dependent on parents’ help and guidance in their use of digital technologies. Older children, who generally had more well-established digital practices, were able to use those for school work as well as maintaining social relations with other children. Children and parents experienced new ways of using digital technologies and while their encounters where not without conflict or frustration, some parents in the study expressed some level of surprise after realizing how their (primarily younger) children had had positive experiences with digital technologies. Families made use of digital technologies in a variety of ways to communicate with their extended family. In our study, we have seen examples of celebrations (birthdays, wedding anniversaries) via Facetime, as well as everyday activities like school work, reading aloud or playing card games through digital platforms. Generally, the children in our study had used digital technologies more than usual, both for communication and for entertainment purposes. The paper will present findings from the study and discuss how these may inform future policies on digital literacy and recommendations for schools and parents regarding children’s digital lives.