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Background: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the lives of people globally and is expected to have profound effects on mental health. Here we aim to describe the mental health burden experienced in Sweden using baseline data of the Omtanke2020 Study. Method: We analysed self-reported, cross-sectional baseline data collected over a 12-month period (June 9, 2020–June 8, 2021) from the Omtanke2020 Study including 27,950 adults in Sweden. Participants were volunteers or actively recruited through existing cohorts and, after providing informed consent, responded to online questionnaires on socio-demographics, mental and physical health, as well as COVID-19 infection and impact. Poisson regression was fitted to assess the relative risk of demonstrating high level symptoms of depression, anxiety, and COVID-19 related distress. Result: The proportion of persons with high level of symptoms was 15.6 %, 9.5 % and 24.5 % for depression, anxiety, and COVID-19 specific post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), respectively. Overall, 43.4 % of the participants had significant, clinically relevant symptoms for at least one of the three mental health outcomes and 7.3 % had significant symptoms for all three outcomes. We also observed differences in the prevalence of these outcomes across strata of sex, age, recruitment type, COVID-19 status, region, and seasonality. Conclusion: While the proportion of persons with high mental health burden remains higher than the ones reported in pre-pandemic publications, our estimates are lower than previously reported levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD during the pandemic in Sweden and elsewhere. Funding Information: This study was funded with grants from NordForsk (CovidMent, 105668 ), Horizon 2020 (CoMorMent, 847776 ), and the Karolinska Institutet . Funding Information: The Omtanke2020 study is supported by NordForsk (project No. 105668 ) and Karolinska Institute (Strategic Research Area in Epidemiology and Senior Researcher Award). We acknowledge The Swedish Twin Registry for access to contact information to participating twins. The Swedish Twin Registry is managed by Karolinska Institutet and receives funding through the Swedish Research Council under the grant no 2017-00641. The Funding Sources had no direct or indirect impact on the analysis and interpretation of the results. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors Peer reviewed

This Agenda for Future Research is part of RESISTIRÉ’s report on solutions for cycle 2. It covers four domains (Care, Work & Pay, Education and Gender-based Violence) and contains the analysis of previous findings from the RESISTIRÉ project, as well as an identification of research gaps. It also puts specific focus on the need for research agendas on intersectional data collection and analysis, and analyses of recovery policy and practice in Europe. It outlines which research questions and topics future research should address, and what questions RESISTIRÉ will focus on in its third and final research cycle.

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) deems gender equality to be a crosscutting priority for the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). Despite this, no specific budget has been allocated to the issue of promoting gender equality, and the issue has not been included among the 11 criteria used by the Commission to assess the plans. RESISTIRÉ analysis of the NRRPs shows that the perspective of women is not sufficiently represented in the plans and very few measures have been taken to concretely address women’s specific needs or the problems they face. Given these shortcomings in the design of the NRRPs, it is imperative that the European Commission take special care to ensure that Monitoring and Evaluation pay special attention to those elements of the performance system that deal specifically with issues related to gender equality

The sudden closure of educational facilities upended the lives of young people, their families, and educators, who were forced to move quickly from traditional onsite teaching to online education. This prolonged suspension of conventional education posed a number of new challenges for students, parents and teaching staff. Students who were already marginalised prior to the pandemic, due to various gender+ vulnerabilities, experienced further detrimental impacts on their educational progress. The experience gained from the global education crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic should be used to develop more resilient education systems that can ensure a balance between the digital and physical space and guarantee that no one is left behind. The insights provided below are developed on the basis of findings from quantitative and qualitative evidence, participatory workshops, and an analysis of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) and other COVID-19 recovery policies.

Most of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) focused their attention on the economy and finance, support for business, the construction of infrastructures, and economic stabilisation. In most cases the design process of the plans was based on consultations with organisations involved in the production, labour, and economic sectors. Insufficient importance was assigned to engaging with actors representing the interests of vulnerable groups. As a result, even though the European Commission's guide on how to prepare the plans clearly stated the importance of recognising and addressing women and vulnerable groups, in conformity with the principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights, most of the NRRPs lack concrete measures targeting vulnerable groups and address different inequality grounds in cursory terms only. The failure to address gender+ vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in the policy design process means that there is a risk that the NRRPs will not only fail to achieve their set goals, but that their measures will further aggravate the situation of these groups.

Political institutions were not prepared for how much gender-based violence was both triggered and exacerbated by the lockdown restrictions and subsequent lifting of restrictions. While some efforts were made to address gender-based violence in the early pandemic policy responses, it is seldom mentioned in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) and policies that were subsequently drawn up. Instead, addressing gender-based violence should be a key concern when developing crisis management plans (including prevention, contingency plans, and recovery measures). Policymakers should learn from the COVID-19 crisis in order to design more effective responses to gender-based violence during crisis periods.

The ever-growing importance of the internet and its spread and reach into the physical and social world are developments that have created new risks and that expose people to the threat of digital attacks and abuse. A crisis situation such as the recent pandemic, where these issues have become even more challenging, can be used to test new collaborations and solutions to address these problems. Social media and big tech companies could be a real ally in raising awareness, educating, and preventing the incidence of digital violence. Highlighting corporate responsibility and pressuring tech companies to not only recognise but also address the weaponisation of their platforms and take concrete action to fight this is indispensable for pursuing an equitable and safe digital transformation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of a European-level response to crises, for which the development of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) was an important, yet insufficient, first step. In order to develop the capacity of European countries and the European Union to respond to future crises in ways that do not increase the existing gender+ inequalities or create new ones, there is an urgent need to develop comprehensive, inclusive, multi-actor crisis management plans that build on a gender+ intersectional approach.

The aim of this paper is to highlight how TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) trace gas data can best be used and interpreted to understand event-based impacts on air quality from regional to city scales around the globe. For this study, we present the observed changes in the atmospheric column amounts of five trace gases (NO2, SO2, CO, HCHO, and CHOCHO) detected by the Sentinel-5P TROPOMI instrument and driven by reductions in anthropogenic emissions due to COVID-19 lockdown measures in 2020. We report clear COVID-19-related decreases in TROPOMI NO2 column amounts on all continents. For megacities, reductions in column amounts of tropospheric NO2 range between 14 % and 63 %. For China and India, supported by NO2 observations, where the primary source of anthropogenic SO2 is coal-fired power generation, we were able to detect sector-specific emission changes using the SO2 data. For HCHO and CHOCHO, we consistently observe anthropogenic changes in 2-week-averaged column amounts over China and India during the early phases of the lockdown periods. That these variations over such a short timescale are detectable from space is due to the high resolution and improved sensitivity of the TROPOMI instrument. For CO, we observe a small reduction over China, which is in concert with the other trace gas reductions observed during lockdown; however, large interannual differences prevent firm conclusions from being drawn. The joint analysis of COVID-19-lockdown-driven reductions in satellite-observed trace gas column amounts using the latest operational and scientific retrieval techniques for five species concomitantly is unprecedented. However, the meteorologically and seasonally driven variability of the five trace gases does not allow for drawing fully quantitative conclusions on the reduction in anthropogenic emissions based on TROPOMI observations alone. We anticipate that in future the combined use of inverse modeling techniques with the high spatial resolution data from S5P/TROPOMI for all observed trace gases presented here will yield a significantly improved sector-specific, space-based analysis of the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures as compared to other existing satellite observations. Such analyses will further enhance the scientific impact and societal relevance of the TROPOMI mission.