A new epidemiological COVID-19 coronavirus model from Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group suggests the vast majority of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 suffer little or no illness.
Clive Cookson for Financial Times:
The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford. If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with COVID-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.
“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said… The Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, everything is in a state of flux and what we really need is exactly what Number 5 needed: “more input,” as in data. Testing, testing, testing data will come soon and we’ll have a lot clearer picture as soon as we get it.
Worst-case preparations while the data are amassed are the smart way to go. If it’s proven to be too much, we can readjust. As testing in the U.S. really ratchets up (more tests in the U.S. in 8 days than South Korea conducted in 8 weeks), that invaluable, informative data will be ours very soon! Such knowledge will help the U.S. and the world to begin to plan an informed path out of this crisis.
MacDailyNews Note: More info on the Prevention & Treatment of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) via the U.S. CDC is here. Track the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) here.