University of Ljubljana member institutions have been actively engaged in the battle against the coronavirus since the very beginning. Here are the latest updates on their efforts.

Staff at the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Computer and Information Science rolled up their sleeves and set up the IT environment for the national survey on the prevalence of COVID-19 (in Slovene) in the record time of just one week. The survey is headed by the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Medicine, with Prof. Mario Poljak serving as head researcher. Also involved in the survey is the Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences, which prepared the representative sample together with the Slovenian Statistical Office. The survey seeks to answer the following questions: how many people in Slovenia are currently actively infected with SARS-CoV-2, how many of them are asymptomatic and do not even know they are infected, and how many have come in contact with SARS-CoV-2 and have already recovered from COVID-19.

Janez Tomažič, MD, from the Department of Infectious Diseases and Febrile Illnesses at the Ljubljana University Medical Centre, Ljubljana Faculty of Medicine, has written a review article about COVID-19 (in Slovene) with all the important information on the new coronavirus aimed at both the professional community and the general public.

First- and second-year nursing students at the Ljubljana Faculty of Health Science have responded to the invitation of the Nurses and Midwives Association of Slovenia and the Nursing and Midwifery Students Section and offered voluntary assistance to their professional colleagues at retirement homes. Their decision to help out is not only about saying “yes, I’ll go and help” – it is much more than that. The students have to leave their families and expose themselves to a high risk of infection. It is this in particular that makes us even more proud of our student volunteers who bravely responded to this call.

In cooperation with the faculty’s management, the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts Student Council has come to the aid of socially disadvantaged students at the faculty by providing them financial assistance in the form of vouchers for buying groceries at Mercator stores.

The staff and students at the Ljubljana Faculty of Theology are working towards remedying the impacts of the coronavirus crisis by seeking answers to various questions and ways of providing help in the form of spiritual assistance, Biblical guidance, psychosocial support and family therapy. How did our predecessors deal with similar problems? What answers and means do we have at our disposal today to start living anew? What can we do to create a safer and more brotherly future? These are only a few of the important questions we face today.

The Ljubljana Faculty of Mechanical Engineering has extended its help to families that do not have appropriate technical equipment to allow their children to study at home. The faculty has joined in the initiative of several Slovenian companies and institutions that have donated computer equipment to schoolchildren and their parents over the past weeks. The faculty has thus donated 14 computers to students at the Janez Kuhar Primary School in Razkrižje.

Because it is impossible to cover all the contributions and efforts of our member institutions in a single article, please find below links to some of the articles we have posted in the past.

• What else can we do?
• The contribution of researchers at the University of Ljubljana to the fight against COVID-19
• More advice and even stronger support for critical activities in the country
• The University of Ljubljana playing a key role in resolving the coronavirus crisis
• University of Ljubljana students helping out at the Government’s coronavirus call centre