Published 08 June 2020
In 1957, M.S. Bartlett, FRS, introduced the concept of critical community size (CCS) below which an infectious disease does not persist in a closed population. With a subaward from a NIH Fogarty grant (PI: D. Burke, Co-PI: C. Bunker, S. Pyne) for training disease modelers in India, Prof. Indranil Mukhopadhyay and Sarmistha Das of Indian Statistical Institute, and their collaborators, used critical community size to develop a model of strategic and focused lockdown policy for COVID-19 in a given population. Saumyadipta Pyne is a co-author of the study, Critical Community Size for COVID-19: A Model Based Approach for Strategic Lockdown Policy (PDF), which was published in 'Statistics and Applications' in June 2020. Image courtesy: Wikipedia.