PandemiX – A new Center of Excellence

Professor Lone Simonsen will present Pandemics, a new Center of Excellence in Denmark for the wildly interdisciplinary study of pandemics in the past, present and future.  We will talk about iconic pandemics and epidemics experienced, and the the fundamental idea of studying the “signature” impact of pandemics on human populations over hundreds of years, and discuss two nice examples of “signature features” for pandemic influenza and for COVID-19 that provide insights about the epidemiology, impact and also the ability to control a future pandemic.
 
In the second half of the talk, postdoc Rasmus Kristoffer Pedersen will present recent work on estimating the excess mortality of COVID-19.  Comparing all-cause mortality in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic with mortality in the years prior is a deceptively simple way to determine the impact of the pandemic. However, methodological choices about how to extrapolate pre-pandemic mortality all the way to 2023 can lead to varying results, especially in countries with relatively low COVID-19 mortality, such as Scandinavia. For Denmark, demographic changes play a key role in understanding and correctly interpreting pandemic mortality, illustrating the importance of demography research in epidemiology.