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 (11)
Coronavirus Subvariant JN.1 Spreading Fast In LA County
LAist online
2023-12-21
A new COVID-19 subvariant is growing fast in Los Angeles County ahead of the winter holidays. Known as JN.1, it’s the fastest-growing Omicron subvariant in the U.S., causing an estimated 1 in 5 infections nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. … A change in the spike protein of JN.1 seems to help the virus escape our immunity better than other subvariants, said UC Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer. “When there’s a mutation in the protein, it’s able to evade previous immune responses that we may have developed and become a better infector,” he said. “I expect JN.1 to become the dominant variant, both worldwide and here in California by the end of the winter.”
Heavy Rain, Snow, Flooding from SoCal Storm & New COVID Subvariant
LAist – The LA Report online
2023-12-22
A new COVID-19 subvariant is quickly spreading across the country. JN.1 is the fastest growing variant in the U.S. according to the CDC. … UCI epidemiologist Andrew Noymer says it’s sub-variant of omicron but a change to it’s spike protein seems to help the virus escape our immunity. “When there’s a mutation in the protein, it’s able to evade previous immune responses that we may have developed and therefore become a better infector. I expect JN.1 to be the dominant COVID variant both worldwide and here in California by the end of the winter.” … Noymer says the best prevention is masking and testing. [Starts at 5:00]
Drug arrests plunge, overdose deaths soar: Connection or coincidence?
The Orange County Register online
2023-11-09
“There are a bunch of moving parts here,” noted Andrew Noymer, [associate professor], epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine. “In some sense, the two trends are explainable in a vacuum. You get fewer arrests because Prop. 47 is working as intended, quote-unquote, and more deaths because of fentanyl infiltration. It’s all a bit unfortunate. In some sense, it’s just inopportune timing.”
History Says the 1918 Flu Killed the Young and Healthy. These Bones Say Otherwise
Wired online
2023-10-23
“This has a generalizable conclusion, which is that epidemics don’t strike neutrally, a bolt out of the blue,” says Andrew Noymer, a demographer and epidemiologist and associate professor at UC Irvine, who was not involved in the work but studies the interplay between tuberculosis and the 1918 flu. “They strike differentially, and people who are worse off to begin with are going to be even worse off at the far end.”
Smithsonian Magazine
The 1918 Flu Hit Frailer People the Hardest, Study Suggests online
2023-10-11
“This idea that the 1918 flu killed healthy young people is not supported by our findings,” Sharon DeWitte, a co-author of the study and biological anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says in a statement from the university. “Instead, we found that this pandemic, like many others across history, disproportionately killed frail people.” “It’s an important study,” Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist [and associate professor] at the University of California, Irvine, who did not contribute to the findings, tells Science’s Mitch Leslie. “This will help set the record straight about the 1918 flu.”
Killer 1918 flu didn’t pick on the healthy, after all
Science online
2023-10-09
“It’s an important study,” says epidemiologist Andrew Noymer [associate professor] of the University of California, Irvine, who wasn’t connected to the research. “This will help set the record straight about the 1918 flu.” … If [Amanda] Wissler and [Sharon] DeWitte are correct, however, researchers need to explain why so many young people were apparently frail and vulnerable. One possibility, suggested by Noymer and a colleague, is that tuberculosis, which was common at the time and usually affects people early in life, weakened many young adults and left them susceptible to the flu.
Deaths in Colorado declined in 2022, but were still higher than pre-pandemic levels. Is this the new normal?
Greenly Tribune online
2023-08-14
Colorado recorded 46,751 deaths in 2022, a decrease of about 1,500 from the previous year. Even after adjusting for population growth and aging, however, mortality in the state remained 12% higher than it was before the pandemic hit. … Colorado’s mortality followed a similar trajectory to the rest of the country in 2022 and likely will this year, said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Biden's Wuhan lab funding cut is too little, too late, critics say
Washington Examiner online
2023-07-21
Public health [associate] professor Andrew Noymer noted that NIH ]National Institutes of Health] began selectively defunding WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] projects as early as May 2020. "Some people will read tea leaves that this supports a lab leak origin of COVID-19, but I don't think we can draw that conclusion," Noymer, [associate] professor at the University of California, Irvine, said. "This certainly is not a frank admission of a lab leak origin of COVID, and I don't even read it as a tacit admission."
Orange County Health Officials Announce 3 New Cases of Mpox
MyNewsLa online
2023-07-14
Orange County Health Care Agency officials Friday announced three more cases of mpox have surfaced in Orange County over the past week, bringing the year’s total to five. “These numbers are low,” Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine [associate] professor of population health and disease prevention, told City News Service. “Panic is not warranted and vaccination is warranted. … I would focus on people who have known cases of mpox in their social networks,” Noymer said. “That would be a cue to get the vaccine, and the vaccine is safe and effective.”
Column: COVID-19 grim reaper still targets seniors in Southern California
The Orange County Register online
2023-07-14
The fact that most COVID deaths are among the elderly is completely in line with expectations, said Andrew Noymer, [associate professor] an epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine. “The good news is that deaths are going down. The bad news is, ‘Watch this space,’” he said. Unlike, say, the flu, which recedes in summer, COVID has wrought some of its greatest devastation in summer. “I’m hopeful — though not necessarily optimistic — that summer 2023 will be a normal summer,” he said. “What I’m looking for is to see whether we’ve really turned a corner. We won’t know until we close the books in the fall.”
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.
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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