Press releases

FRANKFURT. The governmental decision on when to loosen social distancing measures should not only depend on the latest number of cases. A joint study in theoretical physics, economics and medicine at Goethe University, the University of California Berkeley, and the Vivantes Hospital in Berlin shows that other criteria urgently need to be taken into account.

Governments should pay attention to the overall situation and not just to the new case numbers reported daily. If measures are loosened too early, the epidemic would have a stronger impact and the overall costs would rise substantially according to the authors of the new study, which is being published online in advance due to its explosive nature. According to the study, the optimum would be to maintain strict social distancing at least until the case numbers have sunk sufficiently in proportion to testing capacities to allow a comprehensive tracking of individual cases.

For the further management of the current COVID-19 pandemic, scientifically based estimates of the subsequent costs for different management strategies are crucial. A combination of numerical simulations and economic cost calculations are necessary, as Professor Claudius Gros and Professor Rose Valenti from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University have elaborated in a study together with Dr Daniel Gros (Visiting Professor UC Berkeley/Director CEPS Brussels) and Kilian Valenti (Vivantes Hospital Berlin). The researchers discovered that a policy that reacts to the continually growing number of cases leads to higher overall costs than a policy that is oriented on the total number of past cases and which also takes other factors into account.

The COVID-19 epidemic is having an effect of previously unknown proportions on society and economics, which have been largely “shut down": schools are closed, only businesses in certain branches may remain open, and people are supposed to stay home as far as possible. Epidemiological models have to take the feedback of this social distancing and other reactions onto the dynamics of the spread of the virus. In the paper, which was presented in advance on 2nd April, the authors introduce a new epidemiological model which expands the typical SIR (susceptible, infected, recovered) model by another feedback parameter. The new model makes it possible to study two different strategies, depending on whether political actors direct their attention at the daily number of cases (“short-sighted") or if decisions are made based on the overall development of the epidemic (“history-aware"). The authors demonstrate that only the second strategy has the potential to extensively contain the epidemic. The current lockdown measures should not simply be loosened due to falling case numbers unless it is possible to replace them with alternate measures that have comparable containment potential.

“Herd immunity" is a term widely used in the public, signifying the point at which the number of new infections ceases to rise. According to many estimates, this point would be reached for COVID-19 when 66 percent of the population has been infected. It is frequently assumed that the epidemic will be essentially overcome at this point. The authors of this study point out, however, that even though herd immunity means the number of daily new infections will sink, the total number of cases will continue to grow, and another 28 percent of the population will be infected. Only six percent would be spared an infection.

The total economic costs have four components: lost working hours, medical costs, “value of life" (the expected remainder of life that no longer takes place is included here as a loss), and social distancing costs (i.e., the economic losses due to limited economic activity). If the epidemic were allowed to freely run its course, it would result in total costs of approximately 1.1 trillion euros – not to mention the ethical issues – which corresponds to 30 percent of the German gross domestic product (GDP). If the economic value of life is not included, the costs of an unchecked epidemic would still amount to 14 percent of the GDP, or about 480 million euros. Strict measures reduce this value by half. However, the social costs of social distancing measures have to be accepted.

If only real costs are considered and the economic value of human life is excluded, middle strategies fare the worst according to this publication. When it comes to a global pandemic, the middle course is therefore not golden. Based on their calculations, the authors therefore argue that the strict measures should be kept in place until the number of new infections has gone down sufficiently to make a testing of the complete environment possible. This, however, would require significant increases in testing capacities.

Publication: Claudius Gros, Roser Valenti, Kilian Valenti, Daniel Gros, Strategies for controlling the medical and socio-economic costs of the Corona pandemic (2020); Link to early publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00493

A graphic can be downloaded here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/87170074

About the graphic: The x-axis shows the total number of cases, the y-axis the new cases per day. The progression is shown.

Further information: (on modelling/theory) Prof. Dr. Claudius Gros, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Riedberg Riedberg, Email gros07@itp.uni-frankfurt.de; Prof. Dr. Roser Valenti, ebd., valenti@itp.uni-frankfurt.de; (on socio-economic and political aspects) Dr. Daniel Gros, Center for European Politics Studies (CEPS), Brussels, Belgium, Email daniel@ceps.eu.

FRANKFURT. The target is € 5 million and € 1 million have already been firmly pledged: The donation appeal launched just a few days ago by Goethe University and University Hospital Frankfurt in support of a Goethe Corona Fund has triggered a huge wave of support. The aim of the fund is to help master the financial challenges resulting from the corona pandemic more effectively.

Donations can be made either via the “Betterplace" platform (https://www.betterplace.org/p78009) or directly by bank transfer to the donations account of the Goethe Corona Fund (Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, IBAN: DE95 5005 0000 0001 0064 10, reference: Goethe Corona Fund). The first donation was the € 250,000 already made available last week for COVID-19 research from the Johanna Quandt Jubilee Fund; this money laid the foundation for the fund. The largest sum so far – € 600,000 – was donated by Stefan Quandt, an entrepreneur from Bad Homburg. “We need to find out as much as possible as quickly as possible about the coronavirus and how it works. That's why I want to contribute to supporting pragmatically oriented virus research at Goethe University," said Quandt, explaining the reason for his generous donation. He would like the money to be used as start-up funding for establishing – without delay – an assistant professorship for COVID-19 research in the team led by virologist Professor Sandra Ciesek, so that the search for active substances and vaccines can be rapidly intensified and further reinforced strategically.

Other organisations are also contributing considerable sums. Santander, for example, has pledged a donation of € 30,000 and will also publicize the appeal worldwide via its networks. First large donations will also soon arrive from the university itself: The fund will receive two five-figure sums from unallocated external funding from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and the Institute of Biochemistry. But private individuals, e.g. alumni as well as friends and benefactors, are also doing their part.

Particularly pleasing is the widescale support shown by the population. Whether they have close links to the university or not – evidently many people feel the need to help finance this special effort. Just a few days after the start of the appeal, the online donations platform https://www.betterplace.org/p78009 registered about 350 individual donations totalling almost € 35,000.   

Professor Birgitta Wolff, President of Goethe University: “I sincerely thank everyone who contributes something to the Goethe Corona Fund. Your donation is also a sign of your conviction that we can conquer this virus with the help of research. And it's a symbol of the solidarity of the great Goethe University community that is fighting together in this crisis. Please keep up your commitment – whether through financial support or your personal input. Your help is needed!"
The spreading pandemic brings with it a growing need for finance in many areas –  more money is needed for protective equipment for medical staff, patient care, training and simulation courses for students, nurses and doctors, but above all for research and development in the fields of virology and intensive care medicine. “Conducting research at full steam in many different locations across the globe increases the probability that we'll soon be able to develop a drug or vaccine against the virus," says virologist Professor Sandra Ciesek. “At the same time, it is crucial for those already ill and those who fall ill in the near future that medical personnel are trained and equipped as well as possible," stresses Professor Jürgen Graf, Medical Director of University Hospital Frankfurt.  

Please donate via our donations project on www.betterplace.org:
https://www.betterplace.org/p78009
(Please share on your platforms and networks!)

Or by bank transfer to the donations account:
Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen
IBAN: DE95 5005 0000 0001 0064 10
Reference: Goethe Corona Fund

Our sincerest thanks on behalf of Goethe University – especially the Faculty of Medicine – University Hospital Frankfurt and all those in need of good medical care in times of COVID-19.

Further information: Susanne Honnef, Department of Private University Funding, Tel.: +49(0)69-798-12433, email honnef@pvw.uni-frankfurt.de; contact to Professor Sandra Ciesek via University Hospital Frankfurt: Christoph Lunkenheimer, Press Officer, Tel.: +49(0)69-6301-86442, christoph.lunkenheimer@kgu.de.

FRANKFURT. Microbiologists at Goethe University Frankfurt have discovered how the bacterium Acetobacterium woodii uses hydrogen in a kind of cycle to conserve energy. The bacterum lives in an environment without oxygen, and thanks to hydrogen cycling, it can exist independent of other species of bacteria.

They make sauerkraut sour, turn milk into yogurt and cheese, and give rye bread its intensive flavour: bacteria that ferment nutrients instead of using oxygen to extract their energy. Acetobacterium woodii (short: A. woodii) is one of these anaerobic living microbes. Cheese and bread are not its line of business – it lives far from oxygen in the sediments on the floor of the ocean, and can also be found in sewage treatment plants and the intestines of termites.

These biotopes are teeming with microbes that use the organic substances to their advantage in different ways. A number of bacteria ferment sugars, fatty acids and alcohols to acetic acid, also creating hydrogen (H2) in the process. In higher concentration, however, hydrogen inhibits the fermentation – too much hydrogen stops the fermentation reaction. For this reason, fermenting bacteria live together with microbes that depend on precisely this hydrogen, methanogens, for example, that create methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide and thus gain energy. Both partners profit from this association – and are simultaneously so dependent on each other that neither one can survive without the other.

A. woodii masters both disciplines of the anaerobic “hydrogen association": it can ferment organic substances into acetic acid, and can also form acetic acid from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. In doing so, A. woodii recycles the important hydrogen within its own cell, as has now been discovered by the microbiologists in Professor Volker Müller's team at the Institute for Molecular Biosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt.

In the laboratory, the Frankfurt scientists turned off the gene for the enzyme that creates hydrogen in A. woodii, which is called hydrogenase. The result: the bacterium was only able to grow, for example in a medium with fructose, if hydrogen was added externally. Different additional tests confirmed that both paths for creating acetic acid are connected to hydrogen that does not leave the cell.

“Though the 'hydrogen recycling' we discovered, A. woodii possesses a maximum of metabolic flexibility," says the Frankfurt experimenter Dr Anja Wiechmann. “In one cycle, it can both create and use hydrogen itself, or utilise hydrogen from external sources. This makes it capable of living both from organic as well as solely from inorganic substances."

Professor Volker Müller explains: “Our findings have implications far beyond the study of Acetobacterium woodii. There have already been speculations that many ancient life forms possess the kind of metabolism that we have described in A. woodii. This is assumed, for example for the Asgard archaea that were just discovered a few years ago on the seabed off of California. Our investigations provide the first evidence that these paths of metabolism actually exist."

An image may be downloaded here: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/86948227

Caption: While acetic acid creating bacteria and methanogens are dependent on the transfer of hydrogen in anoxic biotopes, Acetobacterium woodii recycles hydrogen within its cell (Illustration: Sarah Ciurus, Goethe University Frankfurt).

Publication: Anja Wiechmann, Sarah Ciurus, Florian Oswald, Vinca Seiler, Volker Müller (2020). It does not always take two to Tango: „Syntrophy“ via hydrogen cycling in one bacterial cell. ISME Journal, (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-0627-1)

Further information:
Prof. Volker Müller
Department for Molecular Microbiology and Bioenergetics
Institute for Molecular Biosciences
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Phone: +49 69 798-29507

VMueller@bio.uni-frankfurt.de

FRANKFURT. They are young and well-trained – but a fourth of sport science students suffers from pain in combination with psychosocial stresses. This was revealed in a study that originated at Goethe University.

When active sport is at the centre of a profession or education, pain is often a constant companion – pain being defined in this case as physical and psychological symptoms. “One in three top athletes suffers significant pain," explains Dr. Johannes Fleckenstein, private lecturer at Goethe University. This is an issue that generally tends to be neglected, but he has made it the main focus of his classes.

This led to a master's thesis in which the author Anke Bumann looks predominantly at the situation of sport students. Bumann sent her questionnaire to the students of 89 sport sciences institutes in German-speaking regions. The response was impressive: 865 individuals took part, 664 completed the entire form, some adding very detailed answers in their own words.

The basis of the survey was the “German pain questionnaire" of the German Pain Society, supplemented by specific aspects such as athleticism, extent of training, self-efficacy and resilience. They were asked in which and how many regions of the body pain occurs, which injuries and other diagnoses are present, as well as psychological factors, alcohol consumption and sleep quality.

The study shows clearly: one in four of the presumably healthy young individuals suffers from pain and shows occurrence of what are known as biopsychosocial factors that can foster pain, in particular stress resulting from high performance pressure. More than half of those surveyed feel pain in two or more regions of the body – although most of them report a relatively high pain tolerance. Compared with others their age, sport students have more frequent depressions, anxiety and stress, while at the same time their self-compassion was significantly lower. On average, the students train five to seven hours a week and consume more painkillers (analgesics) and alcohol.  More than 60 percent report of sleep disorders. The findings are the same for all types of sports, with only the location of the pain being different. The lack of self-compassion for their own bodies and its limitations leads, however, to the condition becoming chronic and increasingly difficult to change.

The qualitative answers make it clear that the need is great: There was a frequent expression of happiness that attention was now being paid to the issue and for the opportunity to express one's problems. Fleckenstein hopes that if students confront and discuss this issue early it will help them deal with it more openly – without the fear of being branded as “wimps". In his opinion, teachers could also make a positive contribution by giving more consideration to the health of the candidates during practical exams. And when the sport scientists complete their studies and assume corresponding professional positions, they could gradually contribute to a change in attitudes.

“We have to finally stop trivialising the issue of pain in sports," demands Johannes Fleckenstein. It is alarming that pain disorders already occur in young and physically active students in this number. As professionalism increases, surmise the authors, the number of those affected also increases: “An enormously high performance is demanded, and there is a lot of money involved," says the sport medicine expert. For this reason, the study will now be continued with professional athletes.  

Publication: Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, Volume:(19), Pages:323-336 Prevalence of Biopsychosocial Factors of Pain in 865 Sports Students of the Dach (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) Region – A Cross-Sectional Survey Anke Bumann, Winfried Banzer, Johannes Fleckenstein. Please click the link for reading the article:
>> www.jssm.org/hf.php?id=jssm-19-323.xml

Further information: Dr. Johannes Fleckenstein, Institute for Sport Sciences, Ginnheim Campus, Telefon +49 (69) 798 24484, Email: johannes.fleckenstein@sport.uni-frankfurt.de.

FRANKFURT. On March 25, the “International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2020" (LAK20) will be carried out from Frankfurt am Main as a complete online format. Responding rapidly to the spread of the coronavirus, the team of organisers has rescheduled and completely switched the event, joined by attendees across the world, to a virtual conference. Learning Analytics reflects the measurement and analysis of data from technology-based learning processes that are, for instance, gained in online courses or software tutorials. Learning is thus meant to be supported and optimised.

“Especially at an international level, Learning Analytics has been shown to have a relevant impact on education“, says Professor Dr. Hendrik Drachsler from DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and the Goethe University Frankfurt, who has held a leading role in organising the conference. DIPF and the University, together with Technical University (TU) Darmstadt, are hosting the LAK this year, which is operated by a German team for the first time. Drachsler explains that Learning Analytics is, for example, used to promote students in ongoing learning processes, or in setting up learner groups according to certain communication patterns which reveal insights into their collaborative needs. Drachsler is a computer scientist and Professor for Educational Technologies. He emphasizes the high relevance of data protection in the discipline: “The purpose of technology is solely to serve the learners' needs.“ To promote exchange in this field the team of organisers have done their utmost to ensure that the conference can take place even in the current situation.


Conference in a virtual space

The organisers have responded without delay and made sure that the conference, which was originally planned as a venue in Frankfurt am Main, can go online in a pioneering virtual format. Registered participants can, for example, dial into video conference rooms where live talks are broadcast from anywhere in the world. Moderated chats then offer an opportunity to pose and answer questions. Contributions are recorded, subject to contributors' consent. It is thus possible to flexibly watch the videos. Posters and applications are also presented in purely virtual settings. The programme spans long periods of the day, to accommodate for participants across seven time zones. The team is confident that the format with its spatial independence and flexible timing also offers incentives for future conferences.

Individuals who are interested should register by Tuesday, 24 March, 17 hrs CET to join LAK20. Please go here to register: https://lak20.solaresearch.org/registration

Thematically, the tenth LAK focuses on „shaping the future of the field". The conference is held once a year at alternating venues, under the auspices of the international network “Society for Learning Analytics Research“ (SoLAR). “Possible developmental lines will be traced for the next ten years and beyond. At the core, we will investigate ways of measuring learning and teaching and which insights can thus be gained, how they can be put to an optimal use and what needs to be considered regarding the different areas of implementation and scales of Learning Analytics", Dr. Christoph Rensing from the TU Darmstadt illustrates, a co-organiser of the LAK20.

Besides the general presentations, two keynotes are expected by international experts:

•  „Learning Analytics – A field on the verge of relevance?“
  Prof. Dr. Shane Dawson, Director of the Teaching Innovation Unit, Co-Director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning and Professor of Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia

•  „Group Learning Analytics“
  Prof. Dr. Milena Tsvetkova, Assistant Professor at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science

The team of LAK organisers is acting in a regional environment where the benefits and forms of implementing Learning Analytics are already being intensively discussed for the higher education area. Professor Drachsler and Dr. Rensing have thus initiated an innovation forum, as part of the project “Digitally supported teaching and learning in Hesse“, funded by the federal state of Hesse. Subject to this project, eleven universities in the state are designing innovative concepts for university teachers and students.

Further information on the conference can be found here: https://lak20.solaresearch.org/

Contact:
Learning Analytics: Prof. Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, +49 69-24708-870, drachsler@dipf.de
Press: Philip Stirm, DIPF, +49 69 24708-123, stirm@dipf.de, www.dipf.de