Despite the global panic and concern British Professor Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford released a study on Wednesday that found that far more people in the UK could have contracted the coronavirus than previously thought.
The study argues fewer than one in a thousand people infected by the coronavirus will need hospital treatment.
This follows a previous UK study at Imperial College London that predicted 2.2 million Americans, or 1 in 150, would die from coronavirus this year.
Sunetra Gupta posted the study today on her Twitter page.
Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic (soon to be on medRxiv) @SunetraGupta https://t.co/K8VyqH4rdv pic.twitter.com/MWbD16IIjt
— EEID research group (@EEID_oxford) March 24, 2020
The Week reported:
A model predicting the progression of the novel coronavirus pandemic produced by researchers at Imperial College London set off alarms across the world and was a major factor in several governments’ decisions to lock things down. But a new model from Oxford University is challenging its accuracy, the Financial Times reports.
The Oxford research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide. In the United Kingdom, which the study focuses on, half the population would have already been infected. If accurate, that would mean transmission began around mid-January and the vast majority of cases presented mild or no symptoms.
The head of the study, professor Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford theoretical epidemiologist, said she still supports the U.K.’s decision to shut down the country to suppress the virus even if her research winds up being proven correct. But she also doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the work done by the Imperial College team. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” she said.
If her work is accurate, that would likely mean a large swath of the population has built up resistance to the virus. Theoretically, then, social restrictions could ease sooner than anticipated.
