Category: Pandemics & Society Seminars

For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Lone Simonsen (PandemiX Center). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 12 February at the normal time (16:00 CEST). 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.

About the talk:

When a new pandemic virus emerges in a naive population, the only control options are nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) until vaccines or effective treatments become available. Here, we report on the Danish suppression strategy and use of a combination of NPIs with a notable absence of extremely strict measures (such as stay-at-home orders). Only 7% of Danes were infected (serological evidence) in the first year of the pandemic, compared with 50% in Lombardy in the first wave alone. This low attack rate was accomplished by initial rapid intervention with a free-of-charge mass testing program beginning in October 2020, a strong digital data infrastructure, timely contact tracing and voluntary home isolation, real-time reporting of surveillance data, and a high degree of public trust. The individual contribution of each NPI to the pandemic control is difficult to assess; yet, evidence points to the mass testing program as being particularly effective in removing infected individuals from the pool. In January 2021, vaccines became available, and 96% of Danes over 50 years of age were vaccinated twice with an mRNA vaccine by summer. On February 1, 2022, while facing the Omicron variant and with the older adult newly boosted, Denmark became the first country to drop all NPIs. A few months later, 70% of the population had been infected with the Omicron variant, showing the SARS-CoV-2 transmission potential when unmitigated. Denmark was only close to intensive care unit capacity during the second wave in winter 2020-2021, when 5% of the population was infected. In conclusion, the effectiveness of the combined NPIs is evident due to the low ( < 10%) attack rate in the first two waves before vaccines became available, far from the experience of unmitigated COVID-19 in Lombardy in spring 2020, with a 50% attack rate and catastrophic levels of severe morbidity and mortality.

You can read the full paper here: A disease suppression strategy in action: The impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark – ScienceDirect

About the speaker:

Lone Simonsen is a Professor of Population Health Sciences, at the Department of Science and Environment at Roskilde University. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and involves colleagues and methodologies from fields ranging from history to mathematics. Over the past 25 years she has worked internationally as an epidemiologist and researcher. She is the center leader of PandemiX Center of Excellence (Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Pandemic Signatures), supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF).

For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Ulrik Hvid (PandemiX Center and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 5 February at the normal time (16:00 CEST). 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.

Blurb:

Over the summer of 2022, an outbreak of clade IIb mpox swept the globe, but then seemed to fade as quickly as it had arrived. The disease was heavily concentrated among men who have sex with men and had a high comorbidity with HIV, indicating risky sexual behavior. What happened? Did the risk-group get immunized? Did the fear of infection lead risk groups into abstinence? Did the smallpox vaccine save us?

You can read the full paper here: Relationship dynamics and behavioral adaptations in the control of the 2022 mpox epidemic | PNAS

Bio:

Ulrik Hvid is a PhD student at the PandemiX Center and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Trained in biophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute, he uses the methods of network science and complexity theory to understand the dynamics of disease spread.

For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Lieke Fleur Heupink (Akershus University Hospital). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 29th January at the normal time (16:00 CEST). 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.

About the talk

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted healthcare delivery globally, forcing hospital administrators to make difficult ad hoc decisions about postponing or cancelling elective care to ensure adequate capacity for COVID-19 patients. This resulted in missed care and increased waiting times for health services across many countries. While various data-driven models were developed during the pandemic to assist decision makers, most focussed on transmission dynamics and the potential effects from infection prevention and control measures. Although these models provided valuable insight into slowing the spread of disease – buying hospitals more time to prepare – they were not tailored to the unique contexts of individual hospitals. Leveraging facility-level data presents unique opportunities to provide hospital-specific predictions that administrators need for operational planning. This locally gathered hospital data can be used to build analytical models accounting for the diversity within their catchment areas. However, smaller sample sizes at the local level may introduce methodological challenges. Using COVID-19 data from a Norwegian hospital as case study, this research explores how hospital-level data can be utilized to develop tools that provide timely and actionable information to decision makers at individual hospitals, ultimately enhancing their preparedness during future pandemics.

About the Speaker

Lieke Fleur Heupink is a PhD researcher at the Health Service Research Department at Akershus University Hospital and the University of Oslo. She applies epidemiological and health economics methods to analyse COVID-19 data with the aim to strengthen hospital preparedness and response.

For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Sanjay Gyawali (Akershus University Hospital). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 22th January at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

About the talk

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed significant gaps in global preparedness. As we navigate the recovery phase, the risk of future pandemics remains one of the most pressing challenges to global safety. During the pandemic, a wide range of control measures were implemented worldwide, often with limited evidence of their effectiveness. In the project “Lessons from pandemic”, we investigate the effectiveness and impact of these measures—the key strategies employed by governments in response to the pandemic—from multiple perspectives through a comprehensive analysis of various sources of COVID-19 data from different regions in Norway. Our objective is to identify optimal strategies that mitigate health risks and minimize unnecessary social and economic burdens. Ultimately, we aim to transform the insights gained from the COVID-19 experience into actionable strategies that strengthen preparedness for future health crises. In my talk, I will present preliminary findings from this ongoing project.

About the Speaker

Sanjay Gyawali is a PhD candidate at the Health Services Research Unit (HØKH), Akershus University Hospital. Gyawali  has a background in epidemiology and has a Master of Philosophy (MPhil)  in Global Health from the University of Bergen. He is currently working on a project to prepare for the next pandemic. 

For the ninth and final Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Mallika Snyder (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 11th December at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

Blurb: Millions of people have lost a relative to COVID-19, with many of these individuals likely to be alive well into this century. How might this population influence how the COVID-19 pandemic is remembered, and how may this shape policy and popular responses to future crises? This talk presents ongoing research using demographic microsimulation to predict the extent and trajectory of what we term “kinship memory” – the share of a population bereaved by a mortality crisis – in the context of COVID-19 in 120 countries around the world from 2025 to 2100. Our findings show that the continued survival of a large proportion of grandchildren will contribute to greater stability of kinship memory, with around 1 percent of the 2100 population of most regions related to a victim. However, the extent of this stability is limited by the relatively older age structure of COVID-19 excess mortality, which shapes the predicted ages of bereaved kin and the extent of their projected survival. Our work highlights the role of demographic structure of both the group of bereaved relatives and the overall population in shaping the projected kinship memory of a crisis.

Bio: Mallika Snyder is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. Her research focuses on measuring the demographic impact of crisis-related population change in limited-data settings, and better understanding its implications for affected populations and individuals. Drawing on computational demographic methods and non-traditional data sources, her recent work has explored topics including the effects of COVID-19 excess mortality on kinship networks, as well as the development of innovative methods to better integrate information on crisis-related mobility into subnational population projections used to inform United Nations humanitarian action. A graduate of the UC Berkeley PhD program in Demography and the MA in Statistics, she recently joined MPIDR from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), where she worked as an applied demographer focused on population data and estimation in humanitarian settings.

For the eighth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Sheilagh Ogilvie (All Souls College, University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

Blurb: How do societies use institutions – the humanly devised rules of social interaction – to tackle epidemic disease? Controlling Contagion (Princeton University Press, 2025) uses evidence from seven centuries of pandemics to show how societies tackled externalities – situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others in addition to those that I myself incur. It explores how markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families dealt with the negative externalities of contagion; the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunisation; and the cross-border externalities of quarantine, vaccine diplomacy, and river agreements. It shows how, long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated to deal with biological shocks.

Biography: Sheilagh Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She explores the lives of ordinary people in the past and tries to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. She is interested in how social institutions shaped economic development since the Middle Ages. She has recently launched a research project on “Serfdom and Economic Development, c. 1000-1861”.

For the seventh Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Andrea Kifyasi (University of Dar es Salaam). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 13th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

Blurb: The 1957-58 Asian flu was one of the global pandemics caused by the influenza ‘A’ virus, subtype H2N2. This flu pandemic claimed approximately one to four million lives, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. Generally, published research literature on Asian flu is scarce. A few studies document its history in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Limited information exists regarding the history and socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic in Africa. This paper aims to fill this lacuna by exploring the history of the pandemic in colonial Tanganyika. It demonstrates that, although the virus primarily affected Asia, Europe, and North America, Africa was also impacted, indicating that the continent was equally vulnerable to global pandemics. Tanganyika, for instance, was among the first African colonial territories severely affected by the virus, experiencing its impact at an early stage. This paper critically examines the responses of the colonial government, the World Health Organization, and the community in their efforts to combat influenza, highlighting the urgency of the situation. Overall, the paper illuminates that the flu infected many individuals and sparked significant panic in both the colonial public health sector and the general community. However, compared to the 1918-19 Spanish flu, the Asian flu recorded lower morbidity and mortality rates due to its nature and the effective use of antibiotics and other non-biomedical measures. Focusing on Tanganyika, this paper employs a qualitative analytical method on relevant archival and published sources to uncover the history of the pandemic in colonial Africa.

Biography: Andrea Azizi Kifyasi is a senior lecturer at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kifyasi specialises in medical history and is interested in global health, China’s aid to Africa, medical diplomacy, and Cold War politics. He earned his PhD at the Department of History, University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2021, a Master of Arts in Chinese Studies at Zhejiang University, China, in 2016, a Master of Arts in History at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2015, and a bachelor degree in Arts with Education (Hons.) at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2011.

For the sixth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Christoph Gradmann (University of Oslo). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 6th November at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

Blurb: Tuberculosis as a chronic infectious disease seems to sit oddly with common notions of what is to be considered epidemic or endemic. As a result, the conditions presence is often endemic in character, but the term itself is rarely employed. However, the question of an epidemic or endemic character was explicitly addressed was in studies of African tuberculosis between the world wars. Around 1930, researchers were exploring its presence in Africa, and many were favouring Lyle Cummins’ hypothesis that, much like European colonisation, the condition was a recent arrival in Africa. This meant that there had to be a quickly spreading epidemic into a susceptible population. In my paper, I will look at the epidemiological surveying that was done in Northern Tanganyika in exploration of Cummins’ theory. What does it teach us about colonial science? What happened to Cummins’ explanation when available data – as they were – supported it less and less?

Biography: Christoph Gradmann is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Oslo, Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. His research interests range from 19^th ct medical bacteriology, through 20^th ct drug development, antibiotics resistances to the history of tuberculosis Africa. He has published several monographs, numerous editions, guest editorships and many papers. He is the author of ‘Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology, JHUP 2009’,  ‘Global Health and the New World Order’ (with Claire Beaudevin, Jean-Paul Gaudillière Anne Lovel and Laurent Pordie), Manchester University Press, 2020 and of ‘Another Magic Mountain: Kibong’oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920-2000.’ Ohio University Press, 2025.

For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Florian Bonnet (INED). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 30th October at the normal time (1600 CEST). 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.

Blurb: Why were some regions hit much harder by COVID-19 than others—and how new was this geography of mortality? In this talk, I will examine regional excess mortality during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 across more than 500 regions in France and Europe, highlighting which areas were most affected and how spatial patterns evolved over time. I will then compare these recent patterns with four major mortality crises of the 20th and 21st centuries: the Spanish flu, the 1911 and 2003 heatwaves, and the Hong Kong flu. Using harmonized regional mortality data from the French Human Mortality Database, I will explore how the magnitude and spatial structure of excess mortality during COVID-19 fit within a longer historical continuum of longevity shocks.

Biography: Florian Bonnet is a tenured researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined). His work lies at the intersection of demography, economics, history, and geography, with a focus on the long-term evolution of social and spatial inequalities in longevity and economic development in France and across Europe. He combines historical data reconstruction with spatial and statistical analysis to uncover how regional disparities in mortality and living standards have emerged, persisted, and transformed over time. All his works can be found there: https://sites.google.com/view/florianbonnet/recherche?authuser=0