Events

CPR-CSH Digital workshop: COVID-19 pandemic and social sciences: theorising, observing and simulating emerging diseases at urban scale

Date and Time

April 28, 2020

12:00 am to

Location

Online via Zoom

CPR and CSH are pleased to invite you to a digital workshop on

COVID-19 pandemic and social sciences: theorising, observing and simulating emerging diseases at urban scale

Speaker: Olivier Telle

Tuesday, 28th April 2020, 3:45 P.M.

The session will be online via Zoom. To register, kindly fill this form.

If there is an issue, please email urbanization@cprindia.org

About the talk

The global emergence of COVID-19 is a reminder that our societies are going through massive and recurring infectious diseases pandemics. This statement might appear naïve, but forty years ago researchers thought that infectious diseases were controlled. It is important to reconnect the global spread of these diseases with the social and economic evolution of our societies – the intensification of connectivity between territories worldwide is clearly one of the factors that have contributed to our increasing vulnerabilities toward emerging diseases.

The challenges of examining mobility data at a local scale, notably in countries like India, is a serious issue for producing credible research that will support policy solutions. Preliminary results from ongoing research using social network data could be a first step to change this.

This presentation will begin with conceptualising emerging diseases such as COVID-19 and will then offer examples of dengue and urban malaria geography at urban scale, by way of learning from previous epidemics of recurring emerging diseases to structure our thoughts toward the recent COVID-19 pandemic. What is the role of space and social and economic environments in the geography of emerging diseases? How can we link mobility and virus diffusion at an urban scale?

After having presented observational epidemiology, we will finally introduce a simulation model of COVID-19 diffusion that examines the mobility pattern observed in India and Colombia. This model is being developed in collaboration with Institut Pasteur Paris, Centre for Policy Research, University of Liverpool, and University Paris 1.

About the speaker

Olivier Telle is an urban health geographer at Centre National de la Recherche Française (CNRS) and Centre de Sciences Humaines, and a Visiting Fellow at CPR. His research aims to better understand how socio-spatial dynamics of cities are connected to epidemic diffusion in India (Delhi), as well as Asia (Vientiane, Bangkok). By integrating human mobility, socio-economic, and governance disparities, Olivier aims to reduce disease diffusion within and between cities. He is particularly interested in reconnecting sanitation with urban health. Before being recruited by CNRS, Olivier conducted a 3 years postdoc at Institut Pasteur Paris (Functionnal Genetic of Infectious diseases).

Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here