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Clark’s ‘COVID Posse’ eyes intersection of pandemic and race Veer Mudambi Worcester Magazine | USA TODAY NETWORK
The pandemic has led to no shortage of strange situations — in-person meetings to zoom, inside dining to curbside, and handshakes to elbow bumps. However, an oceanographer, a sociologist and a morphologist working together to analyze the intersection of COVID-19 infections and race is still an unusual mix. Nathan Ahlgren, professor of biology at Clark, began collecting data early in the pandemic on COVID infection rates in towns throughout Worcester County. Sifting through public records, he would collect each town’s case numbers, graph them and put them up on Twitter, with the hope of making the data more readily accessible. This would seem a perfectly normal academic pursuit, except Ahlgren, an oceanographer by training, previously researched cyanobacteria at Patch Reservoir. Having teamed up with two other Clark colleagues, Professor Rosalie Torres Stone from the department of sociology and fellow biology professor Philip Bergmann, Ahlgren was the data collector of what students have come to call “the COVID posse.” While interdisciplinary collaboration is not unusual in academia, for those outside the ivory tower, the various departments and fi elds of research are considered fairly separate. However, Ahlgren felt confi dent enough to venture not only into issues of virology and public health, but sociology and racism as well. Stone, in her wheelhouse, had been studying how certain factors, known as the social determinants of health, played a disproportionately large part in how a community is aff ected by COVID. Specifi cally, she looked at how where someone lives can increase their risk of infection, making her research the perfect match for Ahlgren’s location-based
Associate professor of sociology Rosalie Torres Stone, associate professor of biology Philip Bergmann and associate professor of biology Nathan Ahlgren at Clark University. ASHLEY GREEN/TELEGRAM & GAZETTE
research. Ahlgren’s project began when he wanted to see how things were progressing in individual towns and cities. It was still at that point when a great deal of information was at the state or county level. However, that was too broad because Worcester County is so diverse, encompassing a range of suburban to urban areas. Ahlgren wanted to know what was going on in his city, for instance, “I was curious about why
Worcester has higher rates of infection per capita than Shrewsbury next door.” His research on cyanobacteria to COVID is actually not so far a jump, Ahlgren explained, as cyanobacterial viruses can aff ect humans. “It was unnatural,” he said, referring to his time at Patch Reservoir. “The color was so bold that it looked like paint chips.” He went on to explain that the common thread may be that “when a scientist, no matter the discipline, sees some phenomena or
something with data, like a pandemic, you’re curious to look at it and see why it’s happening.” Stone knew that some factors increase COVID rates and the chance of death, like age and any underlying serious health conditions. “However,” she pointed out, “they were accounted for and rates were still disproportionately high.” Then she began to read numerous See POSSE, Page 5
