Pandemics & Society Seminar, 3 April: The COVID-19 Pandemic in the Global South

masv on 2. April 2025

For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Marília Nepomuceno (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 3 April at the normal time (1600 CEST). For our attendees outside of Europe, please note that Central European Summer Time has begun, you can check the seminar time in your time zone here. More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

We also note that the seminar previously scheduled for 22 May with Katarina Luise Matthes (Universität Zürich) has been postponed until Fall 2025.

Abstract

This talk explores the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South, and highlights why context matters in understanding pandemics. I will discuss two key aspects: (1) the demographic challenges that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face in responding to pandemics and epidemics, with a focus on older populations, and (2) how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped overall levels of mortality and the age structure of causes of death in an LMIC. This presentation invites you to rethink pandemic preparedness and impact beyond the high-income framework.

About the Speaker

Marília Nepomuceno is a research scientist and PhD training chair at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research focuses on advancing demographic methods, and mortality and health in later life, addressing multiple dimensions of demographic analysis, including age, gender, education, and spatial dimensions. Marília’s research also includes data quality in low- and middle-income countries, the centenarian population, lifespan inequalities, mortality shocks, and seasonal mortality.

New Guest Researcher: Umit Tleshova

masv on 31. March 2025

We look forward to welcoming Umit Tleshova as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC) at Oslo Metropolitan University from April 25th to May 30th, 2025. Umit is a PhD student at the Department of Demography and Geodemography at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on mortality inequalities, particularly in the WHO European Region, examining life expectancy trends, gender gaps, and the impact of governance on health outcomes.

Umit’s academic journey is deeply rooted in demography and public health. Her article, co-authored with Dr. Klára Hulíková Tesárková and Prof. Dagmar Dzúrová, “Decoding Life Expectancy Gaps: A Long-Term Decomposition Analysis of Three WHO European Region Country Groups,” was recently accepted for publication in Taylor & Francis, Cogent Social Sciences Journal. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of life expectancy trends and their decomposition across different country groups within the WHO EUR, introducing a novel statistical methodology and contributing to Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) on health and well-being. Her second study, “COVID-19 Mortality Data and Level of Democracy in Post-Communist Countries: Data Sources and Accuracy,” examines the relationship between governance and the accuracy of reported COVID-19 mortality data. During her Master’s program, Umit conducted field research in Nairobi, Kenya. This research focused on engaging with social enterprises and analyzing economic challenges faced by females in developing economies, further shaping her interest in demographic and public health disparities.

At PANSOC, Umit aims to collaborate with leading researchers to explore the intersection of pandemics, socioeconomic disparities, and governance. She is particularly interested in contributing to the centre’s mission to reduce social inequalities (UN SDG Goal 10), eradicate poverty (Goal 1), and ensure good health for all (Goal 3). Engaging with PANSOC’s interdisciplinary discussions, webinar series, and collaborative research environment, Umit looks forward to further refining her work on mortality inequalities and their broader implications for public health policy.

Contact: tleshovu@natur.cuni.cz, umit.tleshova@gmail.com

Pandemics & Society Seminar, 20 March: How can pathogen genomic data uncover community drivers and determinants of COVID-19 spread?

masv on 19. March 2025

For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Jessica Stockdale (Simon Fraser University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20 March at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Abstract

Genomic epidemiology has become a critical part of the infectious disease toolbox, that sheds light on the effects of pathogen evolution on transmission. While genomic tools are now routinely used to track the emergence of novel pathogens and strains, their use in forecasting and efforts to model drivers of local transmission is still developing. In this talk, I will present a statistical modelling framework that forecasts the size of an upcoming COVID-19 wave, such as that driven by a new variant. This framework combines diverse global data, including COVID-19 genomic sequences and epidemiological, clinical and demographic features. We are able to assess which predictors were more or less influential on wave size, and how this varied during the pandemic. Focusing on the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 waves, we found that local genomic landscapes and demographic features were impactful on wave sizes around the world, and the importance of predictors changed markedly between waves, reflecting ongoing changes in underlying epidemiology and our public health response.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jessica Stockdale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society. Her research uses approaches in mathematical and statistical modelling to address challenges in public health, with a focus on infectious disease. Currently, her work spans the development of methods in genomic epidemiology to predict patterns of disease transmission, to applied healthcare modelling supporting response to homelessness and housing insecurity.

Pandemics & Society Seminar, 13 March: Ethnic and Linguistic Differences in COVID-19 Mortality in Moldova

masv on 10. March 2025

For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Vitalie Stirba (Charles University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 13 March at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a visible discrepancy in mortality levels between countries, regions, and populations depending on their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Scientific literature denotes the influence of individual, behavioural and institutional factors on COVID-19 outcomes, including risk of death. Additionally, state institutions seemed to have a crucial influence on COVID-19 mortality depending on their capacity to respond timely to population health challenges by reducing the risk of death and unnecessary disease sequelae. This research is conducted based on a hypothesis that people respond to the COVID-19 crisis depending on the information available in their usually spoken language, which ultimately leads to a discrepancy in COVID-19 mortality between the populations by ethnicity and mother and usually language spoken. Thus, by employing a linear regression model, we compared the level of COVID-19 mortality among the main ethnicities in Moldova. Our results revealed a significantly higher mortality level in the Russian-speaking population. We speculatively explain our results as the effect of COVID-19 propaganda in Russian media, which led to a higher hesitancy in vaccination with western-made vaccines against COVID-19, but also by a higher institutional mistrust among the ethnic minorities in Moldova and a lack of institutional capacity to communicate efficiently with the ethnic minorities. The results could serve the central and local authorities in implementing targeted health policies to diminish health inequalities among populations by socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic characteristics.

About the Speaker

Vitalie Stirba is a PhD candidate at Charles University in Prague and a researcher at at the Centre for Demographic Research in Chisinau. He is a demographer with a focus on mortality and population health, and he is part a team elaborating population forecasts for Moldovan central authorities.

New Publication: The 1918–20 Influenza Pandemic in Native American Boarding Schools

masv on 25. February 2025

In a recent article published in Ethnohistory, PANSOC Centre Leader Svenn-Erik Mamelund, former PANSOC Co-Head Jessica Dimka (now Seton Hall University), and the Co-Leader of our 2022–23 Centre for Advanced Study project Lisa Sattenspiel (University of Missouri) analyze the experience of indigenous young people at non-reservation boarding schools run by the US federal government during the 1918–20 influenza pandemic.

With Mikaëla Adams (University of Mississippi), they explore primary qualitative and quantitative data from correspondence between schools and the Indian Office of the US Department of the Interior. This rare source set offers information about pandemic management strategies and outcomes, including infection patterns and deaths.

For the most part, schools aimed to prevent infections through quarantine, preventing visits from outsiders, rather than ceasing instruction. But not all quarantines were strictly kept, and breaches of quarantined led to outbreaks of infection. In other cases, quarantine was only imposed after influenza had already arrived, limiting its effectiveness.

While reservations were hit hard by the pandemic, nonreservation boarding schools did not escape the flu and some had very high mortality rates, over 3% in several cases. The authors argue that poor pre-pandemic health in nonreservation boarding schools, a result of insufficient federal funding, was a main contributor to this outcome.

Pandemics & Society Seminar, 20 February: Surviving the Black Death: Social Connectivity and Disease Modelling in Medieval England

masv on 18. February 2025

For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Alex Brown (Durham University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20 February at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Abstract

This talk introduces our new Leverhulme-funded project: ‘Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England’. The Black Death of 1348–9 stands ‘unchallenged as the greatest disaster in documented human history’, yet the characteristics of the disease that killed approximately half the population of Europe in just a handful of years have long confounded academics. Although largely thought to be caused by Yersinia pestis, it is still unclear how the disease spread so quickly in a preindustrial society. We will introduce our project which hopes to use the latest computer modelling developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak to simulate the spread of the Black Death in England. Using historical and archaeological sources, we will reconstruct the broad characteristics of the late medieval population on the eve of the Black Death, such as their location, age, sex, and occupation. This is the ‘static’ part of our model. We will then infer their ‘dynamic’ behavioural patterns, such as where they spent their time and whom they encountered in their daily lives. Our primary objectives are to establish how the Black Death spread, the likely means of its transmission, and what this reveals about social connections in medieval society. 

About the Speaker

Dr Alex Brown is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at Durham University and is currently the Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-funded research project, ‘Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England’. He has published widely on the economic and social history of late medieval England. 

Announcing the Spring 2025 Pandemics & Society Seminar Series

masv on 13. February 2025

We are pleased to release the schedule for our Spring 2025 seminar series. As in previous series, the seminar will be held via Zoom at 16.00 Central European Time on Thursdays, except the seminar on 24 April, which will be held at 15.00.

To access the Zoom meetings, please join our mailing list here.

20 February
Surviving the Black Death: Social Connectivity and Disease Modelling in Medieval England
Alex Brown, Durham University

13 March
Ethnic and Linguistic Differences in the COVID-19 Mortality in Rural Localities in Moldova 
Vitalie Stirba, Charles University and Center for Demographic Research

20 March
How can pathogen genomic data uncover community drivers and determinants of COVID-19 spread?
Jessica Stockdale, Simon Fraser University

3 April
The COVID-19 Pandemic in the Global South
Marília Nepomuceno, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
**Note that Central European Summer Time begins on 30 March**

24 April
Title TBC
Emily Mendenhall, Georgetown University
**Note that this seminar will be held at 15.00 Central European Summer Time**

8 May
Death on the Nile: Spatio-temporal Contours of Plague Spread in Later Mamluk Period, c.1363-1517
Philip Slavin, University of Stirling

22 May
Long-term Mortality Effects of the 1918/19 Pandemic Birth Cohort in Switzerland
Katarina Luise Matthes, Universität Zürich
**Postponed until Fall 2025**

5 June
Mismeasuring pandemics in causal research: Errors, biases, mismatched estimands, ambiguous channels, and the 1918 influenza pandemic
Hampton Gaddy, London School of Economics and Political Science

New Paper: Norwegian Public Health Legislation in the 1918–20 Influenza Pandemic

masv on 4. February 2025

PANSOC Affiliated Researcher Vibeke Narverud Nyborg (University of Southeastern Norway) has recently published an Open Access article in the Continuity & Change on the types and uses of public health legislation in Norway during the 1918–20 influenza pandemic.

The article analyzes the types and content of public health legislation that had been established in Norway before the pandemic and how this legal regime worked in practice during the period 1918–20. It shows that there was substantial local heterogeneity in the adoption and duration of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as restrictions on public gatherings, as such measures were determined by local actors such as doctors who served on municipal health boards. As in other contexts, there were debates about the suitability of different measures and concerns regarding their restrictions on individual freedom. The study suggests that the lack of coordinated and extensive NPI adoption may have contributed to higher morbidity and mortality.

New Paper: Metrics for Educational Institutions during Pandemics

masv on 28. January 2025

PANSOC Centre Leader Svenn-Erik Mamelund and Researcher Gerardo Chowell are authors on a recently-published paper in Avances en Interacción Humano-Computadora. The paper constructs and validates a Balanced Scorecard for survey data collected at a Mexican university during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The scorecard presents a multidimensional analysis of up-to-date data on aspects of pandemic experience such as physical and mental health, and thereby improve decision-making by frontline service providers and policymakers. The study constructed a dashboard of data collective from students at the University of Colima and tested and improved it for usability. The use of similar scorecards or dashboards at various levels may be a valuable tool for capturing and presenting data in future pandemics, which can improve the tailoring of health responses.