Annual Report 2020

The year 2020 needs no introduction. COVID-19 took the global community by surprise and changed most aspects of our lives overnight. The challenges, hardships and suffering it caused will have a long-lasting impact. But 2020 also brought to the surface the ability of the global community to collaborate on developing vaccines at an unprecedented speed and endure and adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. At ICARS, the restrictions brought by COVID-19 delayed and challenged the achievement of our ambitions for the year. Yet when we look back at 2020 it is primarily with a sense of pride of what we managed to achieve. Despite the pandemic, 2020 was an important year for ICARS. It was the year where we formulated our strategy, “opened for business”, initiated our first partnerships with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and other key players in the international AMR landscape and paved the way for the launch of ICARS as
an independent self-governing organisation in 2021.

While the topic of drug-resistant infections lost some of its global momentum in 2020 due to COVID-19, ICARS kept promoting the AMR agenda through its interactions at national and international level. This was particularly important as COVID-19 accelerated the spread of AMR, due to overcrowded hospitals and the increase of intravenous treatments which make people more vulnerable to infections. We worked with international partners to raise the voice of those who most need support in implementing solutions for AMR mitigation.