A team of Chinese researchers has warned that the death toll from COVID-19 could soar in the coming months, if adequate action is not taken.
Researchers from China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), People’s Liberation Army and public health research institutes conducted modelling studies to predict that the death toll from COVID-19 may rise to 5 million worldwide by March. COVID-19 fatalities worldwide crossed the 2 million mark on Thursday.
Xu Jianguo of the CDC told South China Morning Post, “The development of the pandemic is hard to foresee, but a numerical estimate by modelling can provide some useful information."
Xu told South China Morning Post the number of COVID-19 cases "could rise to 170 million in early March, with the United States likely to be the worst hit".
"In the worst case, the number of US cases could hit 32 million, or about 20 per cent of the world total. India, Brazil and Russia would be the next worst hit, with 15.5, 15 and 6 million cases, respectively," South China Morning Post reported.
The researchers said 300,000 people could die from COVID-19 by early March even in the "best case scenario"—which included use of measures such as enforcement of mask mandates and social distancing and mass vaccination drives.
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"To achieve the best scenario, the US would have to keep its cases at about 26 million, or no more than 3 million new infections in the intervening weeks, the study said. The US reported more than 1.7 million cases last week alone," the South China Morning Post reported.
"The current global fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2.1 per cent, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University in the US. A rise in the death toll to 5 million would represent a death rate of 3 per cent, which was about the level in Wuhan when hospitals were overwhelmed by the then new disease," the publication quoted the study as saying.
Benjamin Neuman, a professor of biology and GHRC chief virologist at Texas A&M University, told South China Morning Post in the best case scenario, the COVID-19 death toll "would not ever have to reach 3 million deaths". However, he warned, “The worst case scenario could be much worse than 7 million… the future of COVID-19 is very much in our hands.”
