The International Congress of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) was held online on September 7-9, 2020. This event also marked ERS's 30th year and was planned to be held in Vienna, but due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it was transferred to a virtual format. During the three days of the congress, 450 scientific and educational sections were held in 10 parallel streams of online meetings with the participation of more than 33,000 delegates. A wide range of basic and applied research in the field of respiratory diseases was presented.
In addition to the main program of the Congress, a series of the open access online sessions were held on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
At the session on tuberculosis, Dr Igor Mokrousov, head of the laboratory of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics, made an oral presentation "Genomic analysis of new pre-XDR/XDR cluster of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing genotype emerging in Russia". The PhD student of the same laboratory Ms Alena Gerasimova presented an audiovisual poster "Tuberculosis in Estonia: a major impact of Russian MDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing B0/W148-cluster". The research was supported by Russian Science Foundation (grant 19-14-00013).
The abstracts of the congress will be published in the European Respiratory Journal (Q1, IF 12.3).
The next ERS International Congress is scheduled for September 4-8, 2021 in Barcelona, Spain.
Congress program: https://erscongress.org/programme-2020
SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Section Program: https://erscongress.org/programme-2020/programme-highlights/covid-19-live-programme
