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

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.

Annual Report (2024)

masv on 10. January 2025

This is the fourth annual report for the Center for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC). As in previous years, we report here on our research mission, projects and funding applications, the team and institutional collaborations, and outcomes/activities.

1. Short presentation of the center – research perspectives and main goals

Mission statement: PANSOC examines contemporary and historical pandemics to understand social, economic, and biological risk factors and inequalities, and to improve pandemic preparedness.

PANSOC is the only global pandemic research centre that focuses on social science and humanities perspectives and conducts research on past pandemics.

2. Research projects and funding applications

In addition to internal Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) funding at OsloMet, PANSOC’s research has been supported by several externally funded projects in 2024. These are:

I. PANRISK: Socioeconomic risk groups, vaccination and pandemic influenza, (2021–2024) (Research Council of Norway grant agreement No 302336). The project has mapped the socially vulnerable risk groups for influenza, confidence in seasonal influenza vaccination and vaccine uptake by socioeconmic status (paper 10 in Section 5 below), and carried out a systematic review and meta analysis on the associations between socioeconomic status and influenza pandemic outcomes. In this project, we have also studied the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples of topics analyzed are the association between socioeconomic status and (non)pharmaceutical interventions, whether sociodemographic factors play a role in the relation between COVID-19 infection and obesity (paper 12 in Section 5 below), as well as determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

II. MERIT – MothER Income InequaliTy (2022–2024). In collaboration with Portuguese partners (Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto, ISPUP) the MERIT project has studied the impact of motherhood in women’s income and careers during COVID-19. We have produced a combination of concrete public policy proposals to minimize asymmetries and promote gender equality in the labour market, especially through motherhood.

III. Work and Wellbeing in History – Young CAS Grant (2023–2024). Job quality is a topic of growing concern in research on quality of life and policymaking. Since the 1999 Report on Decent Work by the Director-General of the International Labour Organization, improving working conditions has become a global policy goal. Decent work, of which job quality is a key component, is a commitment in the Sustainable Development Goals, the G20’s Ankara Declaration, and the EU Pillar of Social Rights. The Work and Wellbeing in History Young CAS Grant Project brought job quality analysis to a historical setting for the first time, broadening the perspective of economic historians who have hitherto focused almost exclusively on wages, and enabling long-run analysis of important aspects of historical work such as autonomy, the career development of earnings, and work meaningfulness. It also linked the extensive research on present job quality in economics, sociology, and policy research institutes to historical studies. These connections enrich historical research with the sophisticated frameworks and methods of contemporary studies, and they vastly expand the potential for job quality analysis to contribute to key scientific and public policy topics by enabling its exploration over the long run.

3. Research team and institutional collaborations

In 2024, PANSOC consisted of the following researchers: Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Benjamin Schneider, Vibeke Nyborg Narverud, Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Hampton Gaddy and Gerardo Chowell-Puente. We have also recruited several OsloMet MA students to collaborate with us.

Outgoing researchers and students: Gerardo Chowell-Puente has been employed in a 20% position (Professor II) with us in 2024 and is now back as a full-time professor in mathematical modelling of infectious diseases at Georgia State university. Hampton Gaddy has been employed in a 20% position with us in 2024 and is now back as a full-time PhD-student working on his thesis at London School of Economic (excess mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic in the USA). Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar has now moved on to a post-doc at Heidelberg University.

Uddhav Khakurel (MA in International Social Welfare and Health Policy) has been a research assistant in various projects, including PANSOC’s 2022–23 CAS Project “Social Science Meets Biology”. Khakurel defended his MA thesis on non-pharmaceutical interventions in Alaska during the 1918-20 influenza pandemic in December 2024, and his MA paper is also a revise and resubmit in the American journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Guest researcher program: In 2024, we hosted three guest researchers, all of whom presented their ongoing research either to Centre seminars or in public fora and discussed ideas and collaboration opportunities with us informally.

Merle Eisenberg, a historian of pandemics and infectious diseases from Oklahoma State University, visited PANSOC between 16 May and 5 Jun).

Nita Bharti, a biologist at Penn State University visited PANSOC from 14 August to 8 September.

Adolfo García-Sastre, one of the leading global researchers on influenza and Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, spent a week at PANSOC in connection with his invited PANSOC Lecture at the Academy of Science and Letters on 6 November. See the recording of his lecture “Influenza 1918–2024” here.

Incoming research assistants and master students: Amal Hassan (MA Student, International Social Welfare and Health Policy) is writing her thesis on the on uptake of non-pharmaceutical interventions among immigrants in Oslo during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lewhat Kifleyesus (MA Student, International Social Welfare and Health Policy) participated in the Centre’s activities as part of the course SIW4500: Research Training, at Department of Social Work, Child Welfare and Social Policy, OsloMet.

Sabbatical: Centre leader Mamelund stayed 5 weeks at University of Queensland from 1 September to 4 October. During the stay he synergized his expertise in historical pandemics with the virological and immunological knowledge of our partners in wet-lab studies (Prof. Kirsty Short), including the use of mouse models and studies of century old extra-respiratory tissues from victims of historical influenza pandemics. Mamelund’s sabbatical was funded by a CAS Alumni Fellowship. This fellowship is awarded to past Principal Investigators of projects at the Centre for Advanced Study, such as the 2022-23 project for which Mamelund was PI – see more here.

4. Research outcomes/activities

Journal articles: In 2024, PANSOC has (co)authored 14 scientific peer-reviewed articles in journals in public health, epidemiology, vaccinology, medicine, and social science and health (see Section 5 at the end of this report).

Top 2% Scientists: Centre leader Mamelund is among Top 2% Scientists in his field in Stanford University’s 2024 recently published ranking. He is ranked 1145 of 69595 in Public Health. Read more about the ranking and make your own searches.

ERC advanced grant interview: In December 2024, Centre leader Mamelund was invited for an interview ERC advanced grant interview in March 2025.

Seminar & Conference Organization: We hosted 13 international Pandemics & Society Seminars on Zoom in 2024 (video recordings available). As part of the Work and Wellbeing in History project at CAS, post-doc Ben Schneider organized a series of seminars, as well as a workshop a CAS and a capstone conference at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Selected conference presentations and invited talks: Centre leader Mamelund was invited to deliver a keynote lecture at one of the world’s leading conferences on influenza, OPTIONS XII in Brisbane, Australia (29 September–2 October). His keynote was entitled “Old data gives new clues to the ‘mother’ of all pandemics”. The conference program is available here.

Centre leader Mamelund also delivered an invited talk titled “Social disparities & Pandemic preparedness” at the workshop “Economic and Social factors in in Epidemics”, 19–20 November 2024, ISI Foundation, ​Turin, Italy.

Post-doc Ben Schneider was invited to give five seminar presentations in 2024, including at the University of Cambridge and Lund University.

On 8–9 February, Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Uddhav Khakurel and Centre leader Mamelund presented at a workshop on epidemics in Barcelona. Hampton Gaddy presented at the seminar “From Influenza to COVID Continuity and Discontinuity in the Factors of Inequality”, held in Madrid on 14–15 November.

Interview in media: Centre leader Mamelund was interviewed on a podcast by Espen Goffeng in June. It was an exciting conversation about historical pandemics, risk factors and consequences. What exactly is long Covid? How much Covid is actually in this condition? Did you know that there was a “long Spanish flu” in 1918? We also talked about Covid reactions, politicization, the Spanish flu, the Russian Flu, the Hong Kong virus and pandemics as perhaps the most unfortunate side effect of civilizations.

Listen to the podcast (in Norwegian) on Spotify.

Opinion pieces: Together with several prominent Norwegian researchers, Centre leader Mamelund wrote an opinion piece in October on how worried we should be about highly pathogenic avian flu (“Hvor bekymret skal vi være for fugleinfluensa? Det korte svaret: ganske bekymret”). In connection with Adolfo García-Sastre’s visit in November, he also wrote on the same topic in ScienceNorway.no in an article entitled “The next big pandemic? Avian flu takes a worrying step closer to humans“.

5. Summary

PANSOC continues to fulfill its mission of advancing the knowledge frontier in pandemic studies through a combination of present and historical investigations, and dissemination of our outputs to the public. The Centre produces an exceptionally high number of publications per researcher and continues to publish socially relevant research in high-impact journals. Our continuing international collaborations have fostered important and promising new concepts for externally funded projects that will build on the Centre’s first four years of support from OsloMet.

Papers published in 2024:

  1. Elienai Joaquin-Damas,  Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Benjamin M. Schneider, Beatriz E. Sánchez-Hernández, Amanda Patishtán-López, Amanda Bleichrodt & Gerardo Chowell (2024):Evaluating COVID-19 impact, vaccination, birth registration, and underreporting in a predominantly indigenous population in Chiapas, Mexico, BMC Infectious Diseases, Volume 24, article number 1376.
  2. Nadja Hedrich,Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Martin P. Grobusch, Patricia Schlagenhauf (2024): Aedes-Borne Arboviral Infections in Europe from 2000–2023: A Systematic Review, Preprints with The Lancet.
  3. Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar & Leonhard Held (2024): Improving Reproducibility in Epidemiology, Handbook of Epidemiology. First Online: 29 March 2024, pp. 1-22.
  4. Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Manex Agirrezabal & Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (2024): Getting to Grippe With Influenza: An Investigation of Why the Disease Is Called That. Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference.
  5. Birgitte Klüwer, Kjersti Margrethe Rydland, Svenn-Erik Mamelund & Rebecca Nybru Gleditsch (2024): Drivers and barriers of seasonal influenza vaccination 2015/16 & 2019/20 to 2022/23 – a survey on why most Norwegians don’t get the flu vaccine. BMC Public Health, Volume 24, article number 2687.
  6. Sushma Dahal, Iris Delgado, Lisa Sattenspiel, Svenn-Erik Mamelund & Gerardo Chowell (2024): Comparative analysis of COVID-19 diagnoses and mortality among hospitalized indigenous and non-indigenous populations in Chile: 2020–2021. BMC Public Health, Volume 24, article number 2337.
  7. Gerardo Chowell and Nazrul Islam (2024): Political Determinants of Health: Has COVID-19 Exposed the Worst of It? American Journal of Public Health.
  8. Lisa Sattenspiel, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Sushma Dahal, Amanda Wissler, Gerardo Chowell, Emma Tinker-Fortel (2024): Death on the permafrost: revisiting the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Alaska using death certificates. American Journal of Epidemiology.
  9. Per-Henrik Zahl, Rune Johansen, Örjan Hemström & Svenn-Erik Mamelund (2024): Responses to the letters on “Mortality in Norway and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020 – 22: A comparative study.” Journal of Infection and Public Health, volume 17, issues 6, pages 1145-1146.
  10. Birgitte Klüwer, Rebecca Gleditsch, Kjersti Margrethe Rydland, Svenn-Erik Mamelund & Ida Laake (2024): Higher educational attainment associated with higher confidence in influenza vaccination in Norway, Vaccine, volume 42, issue 11, pages 2837-2847.
  11. Mathias Mølbak Ingholt,Lone Simonsen, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Paneeraq Noahsen & Maarten van Wijhe (2024): The 1919–21 influenza pandemic in Greenland. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, Volume 83, Issue 1.
  12. Margarida Pereira (2024): Do sociodemographic factors play a role in the relation between COVID-19 infection and obesity? Findings from a cross-sectional study in eastern Oslo. Journal of Public Health.
  13. Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar (2024): Transmission matrices used in epidemiologic modelling. Infectious Disease Modelling. Volume 9, Issue 1, Pages 185-194.
  14. Diego Gentner-Polanco, María Ávila-Amezcua, Brandon Tapia-Hernández, Gerardo Chowell, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Pedro Santana-Mancilla (2024): Design and evaluation of a balanced scorecard to measure the impact of COVID-19 on a Mexican higher education institution. Avances en Interacción Humano-Computadora. Volume 9, No. 1.

Public Lecture Recording: “Influenza 1918–2024” by Professor Adolfo García-Sastre

masv on 23. December 2024

PANSOC was delighted to host Professor Adolfo García-Sastre in November for a public lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The lecture was entitled “Influenza 1918–2024” and discussed and compared aspects of historical and possible future influenza pandemics. The full recording of the talk is available here.

Adolfo García-Sastre is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, USA, and one of the world’s leading experts on influenza viruses.