Listen to episode 37 of ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Dr Christiana Iyasere, Dr Saumya Das, Dr Nim Pathy, Dr Jishnu Das and Yamini Aiyar.

While India goes into lockdown 2.0 and determines the best strategies to stop the spread of COVID-19, countries across the world have adopted myriad approaches to tackle the outbreak. In this episode, we step away from India to look at what is happening across the world, especially in the United States of America. We also delve deeper into understanding epidemiological models – what is required to build sound models and to what extent can they accurately predict the spread of disease. While the episode does not focus on India, we do probe lessons India can learn from what is happening in other parts of the world.

In the fifth episode on the Centre for Policy Research’s series on the coronavirus pandemic, co-hosts Yamini Aiyar, President & Chief Executive of CPR, and Dr Jishnu Das, Senior Fellow at CPR and Professor at Georgetown University dive into the medical, testing, and epidemiological aspects of COVID-19. They speak with Dr Christiana Iyasere and Dr Saumya Das, doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Dr Nim Pathy, an epidemiologist at Imperial College, London.

Iyasere, Das and Pathy talk to us about why the disease manifests differently in different people, speculation over aerosol versus droplet transmission, different testing mechanisms, variation in epidemiological model and whether or not comparisons between countries is justified.

This is the fifth in a series of episodes by the Centre for Policy Research on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic in India. You can follow the Centre’s work on Covid-19 on Twitter or visit www.cprindia.org. You can listen to all the episodes in the Coronavirus Conversation series here.