US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — If you do not counteract the COVID-19 pandemic, this year almost the entire population of the planet will be infected, and the number of victims will reach 40 million.
However, timely harsh measures can reduce the number of victims to one or two million. Such conclusions were made by experts from several research organizations.
Experts considered several scenarios.
In the worst of them, no one takes any quarantine measures. It is this option that leads to infection of almost the entire population of the planet during the year and the death of 40 million people.
By the way, this is comparable to the number of victims of World War II, the most bloody in the history of mankind.
If we reduce the intensity of social contacts by an average of 40%, and for people over 65 (the most vulnerable category of the population) – by 60%, the number of deaths will be halved. However, even in this case, health systems will be quickly overloaded.
In low-income countries, the “demand” for places in intensive care wards will exceed the “supply” by 25 times (!), And in high-income countries by seven times.
More stringent quarantine measures can greatly alleviate the burden of a pandemic. If right now to introduce everywhere the rules established in the most affected countries, it will be possible to keep the number of deaths at the level of 0.2 cases per hundred thousand people per week.
Then the number of victims would be 1.3 million. If you drag it on with decisions, waiting for the indicator of 1.6 deaths per hundred thousand people a week, a pandemic will cost humanity 9.3 million lives.
“Our results show that quick, decisive and collective action [taken] right now will save millions of lives next year,” concludes report co-author Patrick Walker of Imperial College London.
However, researchers emphasize that their results are only a prognosis. No one can say for sure how many lives a coronavirus will ultimately take. However, there is no doubt that the situation is more than serious.
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The article is written and prepared by our foreign editors from different countries around the world – material edited and published by Ordo News staff in our US newsroom press.