Interesting Economist article from yesterday quoting another Imperial College of London study.
As we all knew but nice to see it studied, kinda drops the death rate a bit. Basically they're saying there are a minimum of 21x the number of confirmed cases currently active.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/01/covid-19-may-be-far-more-prevalent-than-previously-thoughtYou'd have to subscribe so posted the important paragraph below.
"The results suggest the virus is far more prevalent than official case counts would suggest. Across the 11 European countries studied, official government statistics indicate that there are 319,500 confirmed cases, affecting less than 0.1% of the population. The Imperial researchers peg the more likely figure at 18.5m cases (with a confidence interval of between 7m and 43m), which suggests that, as of March 28th, 5% of the population in these countries have contracted the virus.
This high infection rate is partly because of the highly contagious nature of the virus. The epidemiologists estimated the “basic reproduction number” of covid-19 to be 3.9, meaning that in a population where no one is immune, and no precautions are taken to control the outbreak, each infected individual passes on the virus to nearly four other people. By implementing “non-pharmaceutical interventions”—such as school closures, the banning of public events and nationwide lockdowns—governments have successfully reduced this reproduction number. Once it drops below one, the number of new infections starts to fall.
The researchers estimate that timely interventions over the past month have reduced the reproduction number of the virus across the 11 countries studied by two-thirds to 1.4, thus saving between 21,000 and 120,000 lives. In Italy, alone, interventions have prevented some 38,000 deaths, according to the researchers. The past few weeks have been tough for those hit by the crisis. They can take some solace in knowing that it could have been much worse."
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