Jared Evan
The United States has become the nation with the most coronavirus cases in the world.
In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths — more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.
America has the 3rd highest population in the world, so many more cases are to be expected. This indeed sounds intimidating, however there is some good news.
Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massively downgraded projection of the potential deathtoll on Wednesday, Daily Wire reported.
Initially Ferguson predicted Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if social distancing and other measures were not taken.
Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
Ferguson explained on Parliament live TV( you can click on this link to see the interview) “should admit, we’ve always been sensitive in the analysis in the modeling to a variety of levels or values to those quantities. What we’ve been seeing, though, in Europe in the last week or two is a rate of growth of the epidemic which was faster than we expected from early data in China. And so we are revising our quotes, our central best estimate of the reproduction… something more, a little bit above of the order of three or a little bit above rather than about 2.5”
Essentially because the number of infections is bigger, the number of death predicted drastically goes down .
When the number of those with coronavirus is divided by the number of deaths, therefore, the mortality rate for the disease drops, Daily Wire reported.
He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower, reported in detail at The New Scientist
His dire prediction in the UK went from 500,000 deaths to 20,000. He did not breakdown the numbers for the US, however its easy to see that the terrifying prediction of 2.2 deaths will be much lower as well.
The good news is the sacrifices we are making with our lifestyles & the economy could very well turn out to be beneficial for humanity in the long run.
Only time will tell, however this is very interesting and it’s worth checking out the links provided
