Professor Gabriel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University recently warned that the coronavirus epidemic could spread to 60% of the world population “if unchecked”.
This figure was derived from Leung’s estimations about how many people one infected person would go on to transmit the virus to. Apparently, most experts thought that each person infected would transmit the virus to around 2.5 people, giving an “attack rate” of 60-80%.
But before you panic and rush to to feed the hand-sanitizer stampede, this number is not a certainty, or prophecy. It’s an estimation. Viral epidemiologists always have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst case scenario, with Leung lending credence to this mode of thinking himself. He told the Guardian: “Sixty per cent of the world’s population is an awfully big number”, which shouldn’t inspire panic but preparedness. Leung also suggested that other countries take China-like measures to prevent transmission.
The fact that Leung is one of Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologists seems to lend his estimation credibility, sending the media and internet into a rampage that this will cause the deaths of 45 million people worldwide. However, Leung’s estimates were denounced by the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, Mike Ryan.
Ryan said:
Let’s be careful in throwing around figures, speculation and scaring people. I just caution everybody to not start throwing around figures that there is no basis for at the moment.
At the time of writing, there have been 69,286 cases of coronavirus (now officially dubbed COVID-19) and 1,671 deaths. Most of these cases were confined to the Hubei epicenter. Only three deaths have occurred outside of China so far, in the Phillipines, Japan, and France. There have also been 9,865 recoveries.
In the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s surprisingly relevant 2011 film, Contagion, it seems that the spread of misinformation and fear will be far worse than the virus itself.
Click here to watch a foolish “coronavirus” prank which startled some gullible subway goers.
Featured image via.
