CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) Hosts Jordan Klein on Social Gradients in the Emergence of COVID-19 (4/16/2025)

Posted: 4/9/2025 (CSDE Workshop)

On 4/16 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST, CDWG will host Dr. Jordan Klein for a research talk. Jordan Klein is a demographer, social epidemiologist, and quantitative and computational social scientist working as a research scientist in the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research’s Department of Digital and Computational Demography, joint appointed in the laboratories of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing, and Migration and Mobility. He earned his PhD from Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, specializing in international comparative epidemiology and computational demography. His current work focuses on understanding the drivers of the spatio-temporal evolution of mortality disparities, especially in emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.

Title: Must whatever goes up come down? Social gradients in the emergence of Covid-19

Disentangling the roles of disease-specific interventions and disease-agnostic pre-existing inequities in the production of COVID-19 mortality gradients remains an empirical challenge due to the lack of counterfactual evidence from a scenario in which no interventions were implemented in response to the pandemic. To address this knowledge gap, I create a mechanistic epidemiological model simulating the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, the first model of its type incorporating novel theoretical frameworks of the pathways that contribute to social gradients in emerging infectious disease mortality and the first of the spatiotemporal dynamics of COVID-19 mortality gradients in Brazil that is geospatially explicit, on a national scale, and uses real-world data-informed parameters. I incorporate pre-existing inequities in living conditions and in health status and healthcare access/quality, and examine the potential roles of two types of interventions: vaccination and social distancing, using different sources of digital trace data to parameterize reductions in mobility. I consider counterfactual scenarios of intervention adoption, comparing different prioritization strategies with respect to socioeconomic status to real-world adoption patterns. I find that strategies which prioritize lower socioeconomic status geographies, especially for vaccination, could have successfully counteracted the effects of pre-existing inequities in living conditions and in health status and healthcare access/quality, even with a limited supply of vaccines. These findings have crucial implications for informing policy responses to prevent mortality disparities in future emerging infectious disease epidemics and pandemics.

CDWG Will be Hybrid in the Spring Quarter of 2025. During this talk, Dr. Klein will join us via zoom with the UW group meeting in Raitt 223.

 

Zoom Registration is here.

Room: Raitt 223 – The Demography lab