Andrew Noymer 
Associate Professor of Public Health | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Andrew Noymer is an epidemiologist and demographer with an expertise in pandemics and post-pandemic social recovery.
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Biography
Andrew Noymer is a demographer and associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on mortality, especially that due to infectious diseases, but also includes work on all-cause mortality and sex differences in mortality. Other topics have included seasonality of vitamin D and mathematical models of social phenomena. Andrew holds a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and an AB in biology from Harvard.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Mathematical Sociology
1918 Influenza Pandemic
Pandemic response
Health and Mortality
Demography
Accomplishments (5)
Social Science Assistant Professor Research Award (professional)
2007 School of Social Sciences, UC, Irvine
Faculty Career Development Award (professional)
2007 Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UC, Irvine
Best Paper in Mathematical Sociology (professional)
2002 American Sociological Association
Best Student Paper in Mathematical Sociology (professional)
2002 American Sociological Association
Who’s Who in America, 64th edition (professional)
2009
Education (3)
University of California, Berkeley: PhD, Sociology 2006
Studies in the historical demography and epidemiology of influenza and tuberculosis selective mortality Neil Fligstein (co-chair), Trond Petersen (co-chair), David A. Freedman, George W. Rutherford
University of London: MSc, Medical Demography 1996
Demographic-epidemiologic models of measles transmission in developing countries: The case of Muyinga sector, Burundi Felicity Cutts, Nigel Gay (thesis advisors)
Harvard University: AB, Biology 1995
Affiliations (5)
- UCI Center for Demographic and Social Analysis (C-DASA)
- UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems
- UCI Center for Research on International Migration
- UCI Center for Virus Research
- UCI Demographic and Social Analysis (DASA) program : Executive committee member
Links (6)
Media Appearances (16)
Dementia doubles in Orange County in less than a decade
The Orange County Register online
2023-05-01
New number crunching from the Orange County Alzheimer’s estimates that the number of folks enduring this sort of heartbreak has essentially doubled since 2014 in the O.C. That’s a startling jump, from 84,000 to 164,000 people, which works out to about 5% of our total population. … “The new number is believable, especially if a difference from the previous estimate is the inclusion of mild cognitive impairment as a category,” said Dr. Joshua D. Grill, [associate professor of neurobiology & behavior and] noted Alzheimer’s researcher at UC Irvine. “Orange County is ‘grayer’ than the rest of the country, so we do expect relatively more people living with cognitive impairment here.” UCI epidemiologist, [associate professor of public health] and demographer Andrew Noymer concurs. An aging population and increased ascertainment — meaning that the comparisons are not really like-for-like, he said.
Biden's final pandemic flip-flop is to end it
The Washington Examiner online
2023-04-06
The issue helped him get elected, as Biden won voters whose top issue was COVID-19 by 66 points, and it remained one of his best-polling issues after taking office. "I do think now is the right time to end the public health emergency, as long as it doesn't mean that we stop doing things to fight COVID, full stop," University of California, Irvine, public health [associate] professor Andrew Noymer said. "The vast majority of the public has moved on from major countermeasures, such as masking at the grocery store; maintaining the emergency longer risks it becoming irrelevant."
California Lifts State’s COVID Mandates on Healthcare Facilities and Providers
The Epoch Times online
2023-04-03
Andrew Noymer, an associate professor at the UCI Program in Public Health agrees with allowing people to be mask free in certain instances. “At this point in the pandemic, I don’t feel a masking mandate is justified for grocery stores, laundry mates, post offices, etc. people should make their own decision about whether to mask or not,” Noymer said in a phone interview. “But, healthcare settings should continue to productively maintain a masking mandate, because they have a high concentration of immune-compromised people and people coming in to seek treatment for COVID,” Noymer added.
How OC’s public health system changed during the pandemic
The Orange County Register online
2023-03-31
Just two weeks ago, Orange County surpassed 8,000 COVID-19-related deaths reported; on Thursday 16 people were in Orange County intensive care units because of the virus. “We’re doing great, (COVID-19) is definitely on the wane,” said Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine [associate] professor of population health and disease prevention, but added that the virus “at some low level …is going to be the new normal.”
Orange County issues new guidelines on COVID-19 precautions
Spectrum News 1 online
2023-03-24
The state's COVID-19 state of emergency may have ended, but a prominent UC Irvine epidemiologist and the county's chief health officer advised residents Friday to stay on guard. [Assistant Clinical Professor, Volunteer] Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong updated the county's order on Friday, relaxing some of the requirements that had been in place during the pandemic. The federal public health emergency is scheduled to end on May 11. … Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine [associate] professor of population health and disease prevention, told City News Service the key metric he is keeping an eye on is the number of intensive care unit patients with the virus because public testing data is so scant it is difficult to gauge infection rates. "We're in the new dark ages of COVID data because nobody's testing, etc.," Noymer said. Or, if they are, it's being done privately at home and the results go unreported.
Orange County COVID-19 Hospitalizations Rise Slightly
KFI AM radio
2023-03-26
Meanwhile, even though the state's COVID-19 state of emergency has ended, a prominent UC Irvine epidemiologist and the county's chief health officer advised residents to stay on guard. [Assistant clinical professor] Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong updated the county's order on Friday, relaxing some of the requirements that had been in place during the pandemic. The federal public health emergency is scheduled to end on May 11. … Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine [associate] professor of population health and disease prevention, told City News Service the key metric he is keeping an eye on is the number of intensive care unit patients with the virus because public testing data is so scant it is difficult to gauge infection rates. "We're in the new dark ages of COVID data because nobody's testing, etc.," Noymer said. Or, if they are, it's being done privately at home and the results go unreported.
Column: Wealthy? Educated? You’re primed to live through COVID-19
The Orange County Register online
2023-03-26
“There is absolutely ageism at work here,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist, [associate professor] and demographer at UC Irvine. “The mortality we’re seeing in the older age group is being downplayed in the public consciousness, and by statisticians who should know better.” … The uptake of the most recent booster has been abysmal, Noymer said, so it’s clear why the U.S. has embraced an annual COVID-19 vaccine schedule. “I think they’ve just decided it’s going to be like the flu shot, and anything more often than that isn’t sustainable,” he said.
CDC Says Flu Shot Was Effective for Many Adults and Most Kids: What to Know
Healthline online
2023-02-28
The flu vaccine effectiveness estimates are pretty approximate because we don’t do clinical trials that are randomized like we did for the COVID vaccine, “ says Andrew Noymer, PhD, Associate Professor, Population Health and Disease Prevention, University of California, Irvine– Program in Public Health, “They do case-control studies after the fact.” … Noymer said that the flu vaccine in some seasons is more effective at preventing disease and that the severity of the flu season is not governed entirely by how many flu shots people get.
Deaths in California on the rise
KNX Radio
2023-02-07
KNX In Depth's Charles Feldman and Chris Sedens discuss how deaths in California are up 20% since 2020. This raises the question of why are these excess deaths happening? And are they directly or indirectly related to the pandemic? Dr. Andrew Noymer, [associate] professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine [said], “Absolutely, I’d say it’s quite directly related, these are deaths that are not being coded as COVID deaths, as the underlying cause of death, but COVID has impacted the mortality of Californians and people elsewhere, there are strokes and heart attacks that follow in the wake of COVID infection and in the coming years we are going to find out how long this effect lasts but in the meantime mortality is up.”
Who Is Still Dying From Covid? The CDC Can’t Answer That
Bloomberg online
2022-09-20
There’s another deceptive factor that can make it look like everyone is in pretty good shape, said Andrew Noymer, a demographer and associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. The infection fatality rate, a number many were obsessed with finding early in the pandemic, is probably now close to that of flu. But the disease is killing a lot more people than flu because so many people are getting Covid. It’s common for people to get Covid several times a year, whereas people tend to get flu — at most — several times a decade.
Monkeypox Cases in the US Are Falling. There's No One Reason Why
WIRED online
2022-09-15
Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist, demographer, and associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, describes this as “hyper-low endemicity.” This happened with smallpox, he points out. Accounts from before eradication describe what looks like a seasonal pattern, but even in the low months, transmission did not actually stop. It happens with influenza, which appears to vanish during warm weather as the case burden swaps from one hemisphere to the other. But work over decades has shown that some infections do occur in summer months.
With COVID surging, Los Angeles may soon require masks
AP online
2022-07-14
But hundreds of daily deaths for a summertime respiratory illness would normally be jaw-dropping, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine. He noted that in Orange County, California, 46 people died of COVID-19 in June.
Hard to say how big COVID-19 wave gets, experts say
Spectrum News 1 online
2022-04-13
“It hasn’t rocked my world to be honest with you,” said University of California, Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer. It’s too soon to say what it will be, and with vaccines and a developed network of distribution, the U.S. is more equipped than it has been for vaccinating people.
Will TSA mask mandate be extended past April 18 expiration?
KCBS Radio online
2022-04-11
Dr. Andrew Noymer, epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine, weighed in on the conversation, stating to KCBS Radio that he would stay masked up even if the mandate is lifted. "That's tricky. I know the airlines are pushing very hard to lift that, they're not happy about it. I personally would mask on any flight, whether or not the order is lifted, but that being said I am a big believer of being careful," he explained.
Orange County's COVID hospitalizations holding steady
Spectrum News 1 online
2022-04-08
The BA.2 subvariant will likely fuel another surge, but the size of it is difficult to handicap, according to Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and UC Irvine professor of population health and disease prevention. BA.2 is 50% more contagious than delta, Noymer said. But many unvaccinated people tend to be younger and more able to shrug off an infection, Noymer said. "Very few of the seniors in Orange County are totally unvaccinated, so I'm not expecting a huge wave of mortality with BA.2," Noymer said. "I'm not expecting a big wave of hospitalizations in the next four weeks either."
After two years of pandemic, have we gotten too relaxed with COVID-19?
KCBS Radio radio
2022-04-06
As we trudge through another year of the pandemic and COVID-related regulations continue to wane, fewer people are getting tested for the virus, making it hard to know where we actually are in fighting it. For more on this, KCBS Radio news anchor Megan Goldsdby spoke with Andrew Noymer, Epidemiologist and Demographer at UC Irvine
Articles (5)
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis mortality, United States, 1979–2016: Vaccine-induced declines in SSPE deaths
VaccineLia B. Pallivathucal, Andrew Noymer
2018 Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by measles virus. We estimate SSPE age-specific mortality in the United States, 1979–2016. The general decline in SSPE mortality reflects that of measles. Shifts, over time, in SSPE mortality by age echo changes in the age distribution of measles in the 1970s and in the 1989–91 outbreak. The current epidemiological situation is that autochthonous SSPE will disappear in the United States, assuming measles vaccination rates remain high.
Models for estimating empirical Gompertz mortality: With an application to evolution of the Gompertzian slope
Population EcologyTzu Han Tai & Andrew Noymer
2018 Using data from the human mortality database (HMD), and five different modeling approaches, we estimate Gompertz mortality parameters for 7,704 life tables. To gauge model fit, we predict life expectancy at age 40 from these parameters, and compare predicted to empirical values. Across a diversity of human populations, and both sexes, the overall best way to estimate Gompertz parameters is weighted least squares, although Poisson regression performs better in 996 cases for males and 1,027 cases for females, out of 3,852 populations per sex.
“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”: The Convergence in Age Patterns of Lung Cancer Mortality by Sex, United States, 1959–2013
Biodemography and Social BiologyNatalie A. Rivadeneira & Andrew Noymer
2017 We analyze lung cancer mortality by age and sex in the United States, 1959–2013. It is already known that male lung cancer death rates exceed those of women and that tobacco use is the leading reason for the sex difference. We elaborate on this knowledge by showing that unlike most causes of death, lung cancer mortality patterns by age are a very good fit to a quadratic-Gompertz model, i.e., log mortality rates are quadratic by age, with the mode above age 70.
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy: Winter and summer pseudoseasonal life expectancy in the United States
Demographic ResearchTina Ho and Andrew Noymer
2017 In temperate climates, mortality is seasonal with a winter-dominant pattern, due in part to specific causes of death, including pneumonia, influenza, and cold-induced thrombosis. Cardiac causes, which are the leading cause of death in the United States.
Did the 1918 influenza cause the twentieth century cardiovascular mortality epidemic in the United States?
PeerJSteven Tate, Jamie J. Namkung, Andrew Noymer
2016 During most of the twentieth century, cardiovascular mortality increased in the United States while other causes of death declined. By 1958, the age-standardized death rate (ASDR) for cardiovascular causes for females was 1.84 times that for all other causes, combined (and, for males, 1.79×). Although contemporary observers believed that cardiovascular mortality would remain high, the late 1950s and early 1960s turned out to be the peak of a roughly 70-year epidemic.
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