While the coronavirus continues to spread, having sickened almost 600,000 people worldwide and killed more than 26,000 as of Friday, recent research suggests there could be good news on the horizon.
When word of the novel coronavirus first broke, epidemiologists scrambled to figure out just how deadly the virus would be and what measures would mitigate the risks.
Although there was data from China, where the virus first emerged, statistics from that nation were unreliable.
As the novel coronavirus spread, authorities around the world implemented policies meant to stop it, based in large part on epidemiological models.
One such model, originally published on March 16 by Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team in London, projected that as many as 550,000 people could die in the U.K. if various measures — such as isolating the infected, social distancing and closing schools and universities — were not taken.
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But according to comments this week from Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London, who co-authored the original study, that worst-case scenario is not likely.
In fact, his current projection of the number of total deaths is 96 percent lower than the doomsday, worst-case scenario projection of 550,000 fatalities.
He says that’s due to the measures the U.K. has taken to slow the spread of the disease.
“We assessed in that report … that fatalities would probably be unlikely to exceed about 20,000 with effectively a lockdown, a social-distancing strategy,” Ferguson told a U.K. parliamentary committee on Wednesday, Reason reported.
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“But it could be substantially lower than that.”
Ferguson also said he is “reasonably confident” that the health system will be able to deal with the epidemic, New Scientist reported.
Ferguson noted on Twitter that “Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.”
“My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place,” he tweeted.
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“Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).”
Nonetheless, this news is encouraging for the United States, which the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center now reports is the country with the most coronavirus infections in the world.
If social-distancing measures are working across the pond, Americans should be encouraged that they are doing the same in the U.S.
That being said, it’s worth remembering that the 550,000 figure that the media repeated countless times was never really realistic in the first place. That doomsday number assumed no measures would be taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, when in fact it was never a question of if any measures would be taken, but rather how drastic they would be.
It’s not inconceivable that governments around the world overcompensated in response to the massive, scary figures that the media originally floated.
Yet while the establishment media played plenty of attention to Ferguson’s original report, they haven’t really covered his more recent remarks.
Some, including former New York Times reporter and author Alex Berenson, have a hunch as to why.
In a lengthy thread on Twitter on Thursday, Berenson touted Berenson’s recent comments before the British Parliament as great news.
But Berenson implied that the liberal media in the U.S. may have a stake in ignoring the news in favor of encouraging hysteria.
“Not surprisingly, this testimony has received no attention in the US – I found it only in UK papers,” he tweeted. “Team Apocalypse is not interested.”
Berenson is correct.
While there is still plenty of uncertainty about the trajectory of the coronavirus, the fact that the worst-case scenario is not likely in the U.K. means it’s probably not likely in the U.S., either.
Americans should take the virus seriously, and all of us, especially those at greater risk, should not ignore recommended precautions.
But we should also not panic, because despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, this it not a doomsday scenario.
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