As president and a member of Belgium’s Superior Health Council, respectively, we suggest that an international consortium of researchers could help to accelerate society’s recovery from COVID-19. The researchers would be drawn from the social sciences, the humanities and the arts to help mitigate the psychosocial effects of the pandemic for people and the economy.
The council issued recommendations a year ago for offsetting the impact of the pandemic on Belgians’ mental health (updated in February; see go.nature.com/3359qkf). These are in broad agreement with those discussed by Hetan Shah (Nature 591, 503; 2021). It has since set up the Belgian Mental Health Data Repository (see https://doi.org/f9jc) as a tool for analysis of Belgian research on the topic.
Similar projects are running in other countries. Governments need such local data and information for policymaking. An international knowledge-sharing network could coordinate these efforts, consolidate the outcome and underscore the importance of the consortium’s input for responding to global challenges.
