Topic description and stories

Cambridge researchers have played a vital role in the fight back against COVID-19, from the use of genomics to track its spread and mathematic modelling to understand infection rates through to innovative screening programmes to keep its students and staff safe.

Underactive immune response may explain obesity link to COVID-19 severity

20 March 2023

Individuals who are obese may be more susceptible to severe COVID-19 because of a poorer inflammatory immune response, say Cambridge scientists.

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Found in translation

03 Jun 2020

How Cambridge researcher Dr Ebele Mogo helped tackle a coronavirus public health language gap across Africa in four weeks and 18 languages with 30...

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Lockdown 'helps fuel rise in cybercrime'

03 Jun 2020

Take extra care before buying face masks or testing kits online, or responding to texts apparently sent to you by the UK Government or the NHS...

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COVID-19 green recovery package – an important and cheap component

02 Jun 2020

The UK should increase its targeted public R&D investments to facilitate a sustainable recovery, writes Prof Laura Diaz Anadon for Cambridge Zero.


COVID-19 and agriculture: the coming contradictory hunger pandemic

02 Jun 2020

Supermarkets ration produce while some farmers are forced to destroy harvests. Felix Anderl from the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies at CRASSH...

To navigate pandemic trade-offs, policymakers need syntheses

02 Jun 2020

Prof Diane Coyle calls for researchers to “break the shackles” of disciplines to build a post-pandemic social order in the journal Nature.

Finding a way out of lockdown

29 May 2020

Cambridge’s soft matter physicists swop molecules for infectious people in their modelling to investigate safe routes out of quarantine.


James Wood enjoying amazing freshly roasted Ethiopian coffee in a traditional coffee house in Sebeta, during a field trip prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

Tackling COVID-19: Professor James Wood

28 May 2020

“Cambridge’s infectious diseases community is making a huge contribution to tackling the pandemic,” says Professor James Wood. He leads several large...

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Science, policy & pandemics – the podcasts

27 May 2020

Hear experts from across Cambridge discuss all things COVID-19 – from diagnostics to diet – with Dr Rob Doubleday from the Centre for Science and...

Social distancing: how close is safe?

27 May 2020

How fluid dynamics can help define distancing and ventilation in the age of COVID-19 through the mathematics of “exhale and inhale breaths”.


Ethnicity is a leading risk factor in Brazilian COVID-19 mortality

27 May 2020

Patients from the pardo and preto ethnicities have much higher mortality risk than those who are branco (“white”), according to the van der Schaar...

EU Settled Status in the time of COVID-19

27 May 2020

Prof Catherine Barnard and colleagues take a look at the latest data and concerns for EU migrant workers - including 'key workers' - as lockdown...

Woman in face mask

Coronavirus: how to beat anxiety when going back to work

22 May 2020

Uncertainty around new measures for lifting the lockdown is leading many people to feel anxious. Dr Olivia Remes shares her tips on how best to cope.

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