Category: News

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.

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.

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.

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.