Study explores what worst case looks like
NEW DELHI: Nearly 90% of the world’s population could become a Covid-19 patient this year and at least 40 million of them could die if there are no interventions to stop the pandemic, a projection released by the Imperial College of London showed on Thursday, underscoring the need to take strong steps against a pathogen that has already brought much of the world to a standstill.
The findings present what is the first significant global projection, taking into account population demography, social contact patterns and health care infrastructure as well as the infection and mortality rates seen in the Covid-19 pandemic till now.
“The world faces a severe and acute public health emergency due to the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic. How individual
countries respond in the coming weeks will be critical in influencing the trajectory of national epidemics,” said the report by the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team. According to the report, in the absence of interventions – such as social distancing and shutting down of cities – the pandemic “would have resulted in 7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths globally this year”.
The virus, Sars-Cov-2, has infected close to 500,000 people and caused at least 22,000 fatalities till Thursday.
According to estimates, the current global population is 7.8 billion. The most severe pandemic in history was the 1918 H1N1 outbreak -- commonly known as the Spanish Flu -which is estimated to have infected close to a third of the population at the time.
In India, virtually all of the country’s 1.3 billion people are now confined to their homes for a three-week period. While announcing the lockdown on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi underscored that there was one — and only one — way to defeat Covid-19. This was through social distancing, which the lockdown would ensure.
Nearly half of the world’s population in at least 35 countries is also under a lockdown.
The Imperial College report looks at three tiers of interventions: mitigation – a method to slow the outbreak but not interrupting it entirely; mitigation focussing on social distancing of the elderly; and suppression – which involves widespread testing, large-scale social distancing and isolation of cases.
“Mitigation strategies focussing on shielding the elderly (60% reduction in social contacts) and slowing but not interrupting transmission (40% reduction in social contacts for wider population) could reduce this burden by half, saving 20 million lives, but we predict that even in this scenario, health systems in all countries will be quickly overwhelmed,” added the report.
These interventions will likely need to be maintained at some level in tandem alongside close monitoring and rapid case isolation to avoid the potential for resurgent epidemics, it added.
The sooner a suppression strategy is adopted, the better a country will be prepared, it said.
“Given these results, the only approaches that can avert health system failure in the coming months are likely to be the intensive social distancing measures currently being implemented in many of the most affected countries, preferably combined with high levels of testing,” the report said.