The goal of the workshop "Civil Protection in the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic", organized by the Disaster Research Center (DRU) of Freie Universität in cooperation with KatNet, was to exchange information about the various nationwide deployments and experiences of civil protection and disaster control units in the current management of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as well as to identify early lessons learned. The workshop was opened by Daniel F. Lorenz (DRU/KatNet) and Cordula Dittmer (DRU) with a short introduction on the place of civil protection in pandemic planning and first results of the research project " Health-related civil protection through civil defence and disaster control in pandemic situations using the example of SARS-CoV-2 (BePal)". This was followed by practical reports from Michael Schnatz, Head of the Civil Protection Department at the ASB Federal Association, Dr. Christian Illing, speaker in the security research department of the THW management and deputy head of THW research, and Michael Sieland, lawyer and deputy state convention representative of the GRC regional associations North-Rhine e.V. and Westphalia-Lippe e.V.  

In all three lectures it became clear that self-protection as well as the procurement and distribution of protective material posed great challenges for coping with the situation. Federalism and the question of unclear responsibilities between health and interior ministries played a role, as did the highly dynamic and politicized situation. It was possible to deal with the challenges creatively and, in some cases, new structures and procedures were used, such as, for example, the first-time activation of the aid organizations' Interoperable Crisis Management (ICM) as a joint instrument at the federal level or the establishment of independent quarantine facilities for returnees from Wuhan in February 2020 by the German Red Cross in Germersheim, Berlin-Köpenick or Kirchheim/Teck.

The workshop was followed live by 150 participants, and the recording was frequently accessed afterwards. In addition to the documentation on the homepage of the Conference for Disaster Preparedness, some results on the question of how civil defense and disaster control can cope with the pandemic are published in this article: Dittmer, Cordula; Lorenz, Daniel F. (2020): Der Zivil- und Katastrophenschutz in der Pandemiebewältigung. In: Emergency precaution 3/2020, S. 19-27