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.