Stupid Imperial College Estimate

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196496/coronavirus-pandemic-could-have-caused-40/

Imperial College is among the highest ranked universities in the world, alongside MIT. Usually among the top is MIT but surprisingly MIT researchers are silent on Covid-19, not even daring to provide an estimate.

These rankings are based on citations i.e. researchers quoting each other's work. As can be expected, they led to in-breeding. They cannot even see obvious errors let alone the needs of the world.

"According to the unmitigated scenario, if left unchecked the virus could have infected 7 billion people and caused in the region of 40 million deaths this year."

Completely wrong data

Where does they get this data? 40 million out of 7 billion is 0.57%
This is a case fatality rate in the early days, which should never be used in calculating fatality rates because it grossly underestimate fatalities for fast rising cases. This should be obvious for those who understand maths and had been pointed out by MIT during the SARS pandemic and recently by an expert in Hong Kong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/opinion/coronavirus-china-research.html
SARS was initially estimated to be 2% to 3% but was actually 17%, taking into account the treatment time.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
The fatality rate for closed cases is 4%, with 96% recovered.
This is a more reliable figure.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
For Italy it is 45% but this is an example of overwhelmed hospitals.
But its case fatality rate which was used by the study by Imperial College is 9,134 deaths divided by the number of cases, 66,414, so it is just 14%.

Which figure should be use to estimate fatality, which is just the probability that you will die? Should you divide the number of deaths with the number of new cases, or should it be divided by the number of closed cases, i.e. the number of recovered cases plus deaths. Those cases will take time to die, 14 more days so they appear to lower the percentage of deaths.

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/03/22/what-have-scientists-learned-from-using-cruise-ship-data-to-learn-about-covid-19/#52019e22406d
"712 people infected on board, eight so far are known to have died"

https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html
"44,672 confirmed cases in China between Dec. 31, 2019 and Feb. 11, 2020. Of those cases, 80.9% (or 36,160 cases) were considered mild, 13.8% (6,168 cases) severe and 4.7% (2,087) critical. "Critical cases were those that exhibited respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure," the researchers wrote in the paper published in China CDC Weekly."

The danger is the 19% that are severe cases that will die if not hospitalised.

Completely wrong assumption

My main idea of writing this article is just to point the most important stupidity. The stupid assumption that hospitals will never be overwhelmed.

Even if we were to take the figure of 0.57% figure, this figure assumes that all patients can be treated in hospitals. Once they are not treated, they will surely die.

Therefore the correct figure should be 19%, which is  1,260 million, if no social distancing or isolation is carried out. Certainly not 40 million.

Deaths if all infected

If all 7,000 million people were infected, then the fatality rate of 4% should be used, certainly not the case fatality rate of 0.57%. Which means that 280 million will die, even if we assume that all can be treated at hospitals.
So the correct figure should be between 280 million to 1,260 million will die in this pandemic if everyone on earth were to be infected.

Real solutions

The only hope is to stop it from infecting people before a vaccine can be produced. This can only be achieved by strict quarantine and isolation procedures that assume that everyone is infected.

We can avoid quarantine if we can test every single person who wants to travel instead of quarantining them but even these tests must be done at 3-day intervals for at least 3 times. This assumes that the mean incubation period is 3 days.

Coronavirus pandemic could have caused 40 million deaths if left unchecked

by Ryan O'Hare 26 March 2020

The outbreak of COVID-19 would likely have caused 40 million deaths this year in the absence of any preventative measures.

This is one of the findings of a new analysis by researchers at Imperial College London, which estimated the potential scale of the coronavirus pandemic across the globe, highlighting that failure to mitigate the impact could lead to huge loss of life.
The report is the twelfth to be released by The WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling within the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (GIDA), Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA).
Researchers included a number of scenarios, such as what would have happened if the world had not reacted to COVID-19 (the “unmitigated scenario”). They also included two scenarios incorporating social distancing, which result in a single-peaked epidemic (“mitigated scenarios”), and several scenarios for suppressing the spread of the disease that can have the largest overall impact in terms of reducing disease and deaths.

Rapid, decisive and collective action is required by all countries to limit the effect of this pandemic Prof. Azra Ghani MRC GIDA

According to the unmitigated scenario, if left unchecked the virus could have infected 7 billion people and caused in the region of 40 million deaths this year. Social distancing to reduce the rate of social contacts by 40 per cent, coupled with a 60 per cent reduction in social contacts among the elderly population (at highest risk) could reduce this burden by around half. However, even at this level of reduction, health systems in all countries would be rapidly overwhelmed, the modelling revealed.
Dr Patrick Walker, an author of the report from Imperial, said: "We estimate that the world faces an unprecedented acute public health emergency in the coming weeks and months. Our findings suggest that all countries face a choice between intensive and costly measures to suppress transmission or risk health systems becoming rapidly overwhelmed. However, our results highlight that rapid, decisive and collective action now will save millions of lives in the next year"

Proven health measures

In the latest report, the team show that rapid adoption of proven public health measures – including testing and isolation of cases and wider social distancing to prevent onward transmission – are critical in curbing the impact of the pandemic.
The modelling showed that implementing measures early on can have a dramatic impact.
If all countries were to adopt this strategy at 0.2 deaths per 100,000 population per week, 95 per cent of the deaths could be averted, saving 38.7 million lives.
However, if this strategy is adopted later (1.6 deaths per 100,000 population per week), then this figure drops to 30.7 million.
“Rapid, decisive and collective action is required by all countries to limit the effect of this pandemic,” said Professor Azra Ghani, report author from MRC GIDA.
“Acting early has the potential to reduce mortality by as much as 95 per cent, saving 38.7 million lives. At the same time, consideration needs to be given to the broader impact of all measures that are put in place to ensure that those that are most vulnerable are protected from the wider health, social and economic impacts of such action.”