PANSOC Postdoc Maria Dunbar has just published an article in the journal Infectious Disease Modelling. The article reviews different frameworks for conceptualizing how diseases may be transmitted within populations with heterogenous subgroups, called transmission matrices. Early transmission matrices were based on theoretical approaches to population mixing, but these have been supplemented by matrices that have a more empirical basis in, for example, survey data. The paper discusses these different approaches and how common methods have changed over time.
Jessica Dimka, Ben Schneider, and Svenn-Erik Mamelund have recently published a protocol for a systematic review that analyzes evidence on the long-term mental health consequences of historical influenza pandemics. The protocol, published by the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, is currently available in open access.
The systematic review, which is now in progress, will examine scientific literature that explores whether influenza pandemics from the late 19th century to the early 21st century produced enduring mental illness. The protocol includes a substantial review of relevant literature on the topic that may be of interest to researchers in this area.
We invite prospective applicants for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships interested in pandemic research to send expressions of interest by 31 January. We welcome submissions from across the social sciences and humanities, and are interested in projects that explore historical and recent pandemics. The full call details are available here.
If you missed the final Pandemics & Society Seminar of the Fall 2023 series with Kristina Thompson (Wageningen University), you can catch up with the video here.
Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.
PANSOC leader Professor Svenn-Erik Mamelund has been interviewed for an article in Forskningspolitikk about the value of basic research and PANSOC’s 2022–23 stay at the Center for Advanced Study (Senter for grunnforskning) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
In a paper just published in Vaccine: X, Jessica Dimka uses survey data from Oslo to study differences in vaccine uptake and COVID-19 infection between people with chronic health conditions, disabilities, and those without medical risk factors.
Governments took a wide variety of prioritization approaches for COVID-19 vaccination, with some countries or territories giving priority to a people with many types of disabilities and pre-existing medical conditions, and other entities recommending a more narrow prioritization. There is also evidence that people with disabilities are less likely to be vaccinated, either because of vaccine hesitancy or difficulty accessing vaccination sites. In a survey jointly developed by PANSOC and the Pandemic Centre at the University of Bergen, respondents were asked if they had a chronic health condition or disability, whether they planned to take the vaccine, and about disease outcomes.
Analyzing the associations between these data, Dimka found that people with chronic health conditions were more likely to be offered and to accept the vaccine, while individuals with at least one disability were more likely to report a probable COVID case (all in comparison to individuals with no medical risk factors). Reporting probable cases (rather than confirmed) suggests that individuals with disabilities may have had less access to testing or willingness to be tested. The results also indicate that further research is needed to determine potential differences between people with different types of disabilities. In terms of vaccine hesitancy, people with chronic health conditions were less likely to express hesitancy, while people who self-identified as having at least one disability were more likely to be hesitant (than people with no chronic health conditions or disabilities).
Overall, Dimka argues that people with chronic health conditions either exhibited behaviors that might be expected for a group prioritized by public health bodies, or acted in ways accordant with their possible increased risk. In contrast, people with disabilities had little difference from people without risk factors, or slightly worse outcomes in terms of vaccination.
We are delighted to welcome Hampton Gaddy as an incoming researcher with the Center for Research on Pandemics & Society. He completed an MPhil in Sociology and Demography at Nuffield College, Oxford in 2023, and he is currently a PhD candidate in Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He previously graduated from Oxford’s uniquely interdisciplinary BA Human Sciences programme, and he presented his undergraduate dissertation in the Pandemics & Society Seminar series in 2021. The central question of his PhD work is how many people died in the 1918–20 influenza pandemic in the United States. In his progress towards answering that question, he is working to develop better methods for local-area excess mortality estimation in historical contexts and to better understand the sociodemographic correlates of both pandemic influenza mortality and death under-registration in the historical US.
For the final Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2023 series, we are pleased to welcome Kristina Thompson (Wageningen University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 30 November 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
To better prepare for future pandemics, revisiting lessons from the COVID-19 period may be useful. Doing so may help to identify the trade-offs of different containment and mitigation measures. While non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly lockdowns, helped to slow the spread of COVID-19, they were not without negative consequences of their own. A large body of evidence has shown that depressive disorder, or depression, rose markedly during these periods. This is problematic, as depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Despite the large number of studies on the topic, these studies are largely based on statistical models, rather than computational ones. This prevents us from comparing actual and hypothetical scenarios, and limits our ability to tease out the elements of lockdowns that may have impacted depression. To that end, a microsimulation model was developed, named COMMA (COvid Mental-health Model with Agents). Microsimulation models are well-suited to exploring policy impacts on specific population sub-groups.
Individuals’ characteristics and actions during lockdowns were based on the Lifelines cohort, a representative sample of the northern Netherlands. Data from the largest city in this sample, Groningen, were used (n=5,193). Information on individual characteristics (e.g. gender, age) was taken from waves prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Information on actions during the pandemic (e.g. working from home, maintaining physical distance) was taken from periodic COVID-19-specific questionnaires. Daily COVID-19 case information for the city of Groningen was used from the National Institute for Public Health and Environment (in Dutch: Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu). In COMMA, the probability that an individual is at increased risk of depression is estimated in several steps. First, from a matrix of ten agent characteristics, the probability of taking one of ten actions during different types of lockdowns is derived. Second, from a matrix of ten actions an individual could take during absent, partial or full lockdowns, the probability of being depressed is derived. Based on a simulation with 6,000 individuals set between 2 February 2021 and 4 February 2022, hard lockdowns in particular were associated with an increased risk of depression. In a simulation with a hard lockdown for this entire period, 75% of individuals were at increased risk of depression. In a simulation with a hard lockdown followed by a light lockdown, only 2% of individuals were at increased risk of depression. We found evidence that the severity and duration of lockdowns mattered. The negative impacts of hard lockdowns on mental health may be largely buffered by periods of fewer restrictions. These findings may be important to consider when considering future pandemic mitigation policies.
About the Speaker
Kristina Thompson is an assistant professor in the Health & Society group of Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands. She quantitatively examines the social determinants of health. More specifically, she studies how social and economic factors across the life course may impact health and mortality. Her projects often employ complexity science approaches and computational modelling.
If you missed our latest Pandemics & Society Seminar of the Fall 2023 series with Lauren Steele (University of Queensland), you can catch up with the video here.
Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.
If you missed our sixth Pandemics & Society Seminar of the Fall 2023 series with Natalie Bennett (Newcastle University) you can catch up with the video here.
Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.
