A crucial British study that helped convince the government to take strict measures to contain novel coronavirus has revealed hundreds of thousands of deaths and a health service overwhelmed with severely sick patients.
On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson closed down social life in the world's fifth-largest economy and advised those over 70 with underlying health problems to isolate.
According to Reuters reports, the projection study, by a team led by Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, used new data gathered from Italy, where the infectious disease epidemic has surged in recent weeks.
Comparing the potential impact of the COVID-19 disease epidemic with the devastating flu outbreak of 1918, Ferguson's team said that with no mitigating measures at all, the outbreak could have caused more than half a million deaths in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States, reports add.
Even with the government's previous plan to control the outbreak - which involved home isolation of suspect cases but did not include restrictions on wider society - could have resulted in 250,000 people dying "and health systems ... being overwhelmed many times over," the study said.
Tim Colbourn, an expert in global health epidemiology at University College London told Reuters the projections in the study signalled "tough times ahead". "The results are sobering," he said.
ALSO READ | Consider waiving ticket cancellation charges: DGCA to international airlines amid coronavirus pandemic
Latest World News
