It’s all about saving lives

In 2022, the Mpox virus evolved into a global epidemic that just kept spreading, and nobody really knew why.

PhD student Ulrik Hvid from the Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Pandemic Signatures (Pandemix) is one of the researchers using modeling to try to map the epidemic. In his own words, the process is all about making a comic book version of a highly complicated subject to describe its most important aspects.

Meet Ulrik and find out why he chose to use his training as a biophysicist to dive into the Mpox data.

“We want to understand how Mpox spreads. Unlike Corona, for example, which can strike anyone down, Mpox is transmitted by very close contact, which makes it complicated to map,” he says. Ulrik hopes his PhD will provide some important pieces to fit into the big jigsaw puzzle that is ultimately about saving human lives.

Ulrik is a biophysicist, and his day-to-day work consists of gathering data from as many sources as possible to paint a picture of the reality behind epidemics.

“We’re trying to figure out what actually happened in 2022 and predict what will happen the next time there’s an outbreak. How many people are at high risk? What behaviors put you at risk of catching Mpox? The more we understand, the more we can plan interventions such as vaccination strategies,” he explains, adding that it is also very much about being ahead of any more aggressive variant.

Ulrik’s work is in line with Pandemix’s overall objective of building up a knowledge catalogue of different types of pandemic threats to identify them quickly and act during the crucial first weeks.

“We’re not the only ones researching what caused the Mpox epidemic in 2022 to stop. We’re about to publish a research article reviewing other theories and explaining our analysis. In it, we suggest the epidemic may have stopped because of a behavioral change that we’ve been able to track across Europe. Basically, there was a huge coordinated strategy and everyone worked together to combat the disease. It just goes to show that it’s possible to stop epidemics like this if we put enough thought into it.”