運用科普專業提升國民防疫意識

Whether the knowledge of the pandemic can be spread fast and understood correctly is very important when we are fighting the disease. We see various technical terms relating to medical science, science, mathematics, and public health in press conferences, news reports, and social media. For example, we often see CT(cycle threshold) value, R0(basic reproduction number), rate of false positive, and exponential growth. Not having enough information, most people might not be able to understand the newest situations of the pandemic, or even understand the information in the wrong way which causes danger. Hence, the core aim of this project is “to equip the public with correct knowledge to fight the pandemic.” Through popularizing the information, we hope to minimize the harm that the inequality of information brings, and also ease the worries of the public. 　　Fighting the pandemic needs everyone’s help. Government, experts, and the public have to cooperate. The experts do the research and development, the government formulates policies according to the experts’ research results, and the public follow the rules. This is the only way that we can block the disease efficiently. However, the experts’ research results and the government’s legislation and policies often include many technical terms, making the public harder to understand. This project aims to bring the public closer to the technical terms. We will use “popular science articles”, “popular science short films”, and “competency teaching materials” as media, to simplify abstract and complicated concepts. We hope more people can get the information more easily, which helps spread the correct and important information more accurately. 　　Currently, our team had published tens of popular science articles, cooperated with Science Monthly for the cover story of March 2021, and made12 popular science short films. The themes include hot topics in the pandemic like vaccines, screening, cost of refusing sick leave requests, data of the confirmed cases, and backlog. We also cooperated with teachers and transformed the popular science articles into teaching material.