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