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Pandemics: Past, present and future

When invited to hold a lecture at the LUSEM Centre for Economic Demography, professor and epidemiologist Lone Simonsen gave insights into the work at PandemiX, highlighting their work with Covid and how they made use of information on earlier pandemics.
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  • Pathogens, Pandemics and the Development of Nordic Societies (Research Project)
    • Photo: Professor Lone Simonsen. By Ulrik Jantzen. Published with consent from Roskilde University.
    Photo: Professor Lone Simonsen. By Ulrik Jantzen. Published with consent from Roskilde University.
    By: PandemiX

     

    Originally published by Lund University. Read the full interview here.

    Just a year after the WHO added "Disease X" to their list of infectious disease threats, we were hit globally with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, COVID.

    As Professor of Epidemiology and head of the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark, Lone Simonsen worked closely with Danish health authorities investigating and proposing ways to optimize efforts against the pandemic. 

    When invited to hold a lecture at the LUSEM Centre for Economic Demography, Lone Simonsen gave insights into the work at PandemiX, highlighting the work with Covid and how they made use of information on earlier pandemics.

    “Basically, we took the phenomena of pandemics and put them on an imaginary autopsy table to see what they are all about. From how they emerge to what happens during the pandemic and how it ends,”

    says Lone Simonsen about her work at the PandemiX Center.

    With COVID the Danish expert group tried to find out how pathogens evolved during the pandemic and how human interventions have affected the impact of it. It’s a very differentiated group spanning fields such as epidemiology, economic history, bioinformatics and mathematics just to mention a few areas. 

    The Center studies the “Signature Features” of COVID-19 and past pandemics (influenza, cholera, smallpox). In essence that entails the use of mathematical models on historical data of past pandemics.

    “Also, now that we have better knowledge of pandemic signatures, we can become better at discovering them even with lesser data. This becomes important both in historical studies and when trying to identify a pandemic at an early stage,”

    says Lone Simonsen.

    Thanks to the extent of digitalized data, it was possible to map and analyse past pandemics. In the Nordic countries these types of data, can be traced back 300-400 years. Importantly, the societal context (wars, migration, mitigation strategies, etc) can also be studied to interpret observed patterns and impact.

    Read the full interview here.