UK scientist: Lockdown a week earlier could have halved deaths

A scientist whose modeling helped set Britain’s coronavirus strategy says the country’s death toll could have been cut in half if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier.

Britain has the second-highest confirmed death toll in the world from COVID-19, at more than 41,000. Including cases where coronavirus was suspected but not confirmed by a test, the total is over 50,000.

Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, tells lawmakers that when key decisions were being made in March, scientists underestimated how widely the virus had spread in the UK.

He tells Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee that “the epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced,” rather than the five to six days estimated at the time.

Ferguson says that “had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.”

He also says the death toll would have been lower if residents of nursing homes had been shielded from infection, something that didn’t happen.

Ferguson developed models that predicted hundreds of thousands would die unless the UK imposed drastic restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

— AP