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"The world will beat coronavirus faster than most experts expect, provided that social distancing is observed, a Nobel laureate scientist who correctly forecast the pandemic’s trajectory in China has predicted.
Michael Levitt, a British-American-Israeli biophysicist who runs a laboratory at Stanford University in California, believes that official data does not support the dire warnings of millions of deaths and massive global social disruption lasting more than a year.
Instead, lessons from China and from the Diamond Princess — the cruise ship hit by an outbreak of the virus after she left Japan early last month — suggest that aggressive public health measures work and that a large proportion of people have natural immunity.
“What we need to control is the panic,” he told the Los Angeles Times. In the long term, “we’re going to be fine”.
Professor Levitt, 72, shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013. He is not an epidemiologist but does have an unusually sophisticated grasp of numbers and statistics.
He also has close links to China because his wife, Shoshan Brosh, is a researcher specialising in Chinese art. The couple divide their time between the US, Israel and China so, when the coronavirus outbreak began, he wrote to friends in China to support them. Their responses encouraged him to take a deeper look at the data emerging on the spread of the virus.
The early figures were horrifying. “The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30 per cent each day — that is a scary statistic,” he told Calcalist, an Israeli financial publication, this month. “I am not an influenza expert but I can analyse numbers and that is exponential growth.”
At that rate, the entire world would have been infected within 90 days.
Rapidly though, the trend shifted. On February 1, Hubei had 1,800 new cases each day. Within six days the number reached 4,700.
“And then, on February 7, the number of new infections started to drop linearly and did not stop. A week later, the same happened with the number of deaths. Based on that, I concluded that the situation in all of China will improve within two weeks.”
On February 25, as the total number of cases neared 79,000, the China Daily News published his declaration that the virus’s rate of growth had peaked and his prediction that the total number of confirmed cases in China would reach about 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.
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Almost a month later the country has registered about 81,093 cases, with 3,270 deaths.
Professor Levitt has now analysed the data from 78 nations with more than 50 reported cases of coronavirus. He said that he is seeing “signs of recovery” in other countries too.
Other leading scientists are also striking a cautiously positive note.
“This pandemic will end. I’m more optimistic than most — I hope by June,” wrote Karol Sikora, the former head of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme, on Twitter yesterday. “But that can only happen if people put the needs of others above their own. Forget politics and listen to the government — it will save lives.”
Levitt’s China forecast
February 21 Professor forecasts 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths
March 23 Official figures from China say there have been 81,093 cases and 3,270 deaths. There have been 39 additional cases today and nine additional deaths"