Just like other researchers worldwide, Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Standford biophysics, has been analyzing the number of the coronavirus cases in January and had rightly predicted that China would get through the worst of its COVID-19 outbreak. Now, he has made a similar prediction for the U.S. and other parts of the world.
Several epidemiologists warn of moths or even years of massive social disruptions and millions of death. But, Levitt (photo, top) opined that the data simply doesn’t support such a dire scenario, particularly where reasonable social distancing has been practiced.
“What we need is to control the panic. In the grand scheme, we’re going to be fine,” Yahoo News quoted Levitt.
Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, has analyzed data from 78 different nations every day and sees ‘signs of recovery’ in many of them. He has been focusing on the number of new cases identified every day rather than the total number of cases in a country.
Here’s what he stated:
Levitt had rightly predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would stop around 80,000 with nearly 3,250 deaths. His forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate. The number of newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients has dropped to roughly 25 a day with no cases of community spread reported.
Although he acknowledged that his figures are messy, he forecasted that, even with incomplete data, a consistent decline in the number of cases can indicate that there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers, mentioned by Yahoo News.
Nicolas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, commented that Levitt’s analysis was thought-provoking.
“Time will tell if Levitt’s predictions are correct. I do think that having a wide diversity of experts bringing their perspectives to the table will help decision-makers navigate the very tricky decisions they will be facing in the upcoming weeks and months,” Yahoo News quoted Reich.
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Israeli virologist urges world leaders to calm public, slams ‘unnecessary panic’
‘People think this virus is going to attack them all, and then they’re all going to die,’ says Prof. Jihad Bishara. ‘Not at all. In fact, most of those infected won’t even know it’
A leading Israeli virologist on Sunday urged world leaders to calm their citizens about the coronavirus pandemic, saying people were being whipped into unnecessary panic.
Prof. Jihad Bishara, the director of the Infectious Disease Unit at Petah Tikva’s Beilinson Hospital, said that some of the steps being taken in Israel and abroad were very important, but the virus is not airborne, most people who are infected will recover without even knowing they were sick, the at-risk groups are now known, and the global panic is unnecessary and exaggerated.
“I’ve been in this business for 30 years,” Bishara said in a Channel 12 interview. “I’ve been through MERS, SARS, Ebola, the first Gulf war and the second, and I don’t recall anything like this. There’s unnecessary, exaggerated panic. We have to calm people down.
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“People are thinking that there’s a kind of virus, it’s in the air, it’s going to attack every one of us, and whoever is attacked is going to die,” he said.
“That’s not the way it is at all. It’s not in the air. Not everyone [who is infected] dies; most of them will get better and won’t even know they were sick, or will have a bit of mucus.”
But in Israel and around the world, “everybody is whipping everybody else up into panic — the leaders, via the media, and the wider public — who then in turn start to stress out the leaders. We’ve entered some kind of vicious cycle.”
Prof. Jihad Bishara (Courtesy)
He urged the public to internalize that “we’re talking about a virus that is not airborne. Infection is via droplet transmission… Only if you are close to someone who has the virus, and you get the saliva when he sneezes or coughs, can you get ill. And if you don’t then maintain personal hygiene,” primarily by washing hands.
He said the virus did not appear to be “too intelligent” — unlike flu, “which is very intelligent, it changes, adapts, and it infects people via their airway passages.”
Bishara said some of the harsh steps taken in Israel — which has essentially closed its borders, limited gatherings to no more than 10 people, closed all educational facilities, and shut down malls, restaurants and places of entertainment and culture — were motivated by the leaders’ acknowledged awareness that the Israeli health system will buckle under any further strain.
Home quarantine has been ordered for “everyone who has passed by someone who may have been infected by someone else,” he protested, “because they know that our health system cannot withstand coming under any more strain, because we are perennially stretched to the limit.”
Referring to Italy’s national lockdown, he said that “quarantine is an effective precaution, but there has to be temperate use. You can shut down a whole country, but there are other means.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) with Health Minister Yaakov Litzman (right) and Health Ministry General Manager Moshe Bar Siman-Tov at a press conference about the coronavirus, at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on March 11, 2020. Netanyahu is explaining how the coronavirus can spread from a sneeze. (Flash90)
At this stage, he said, “we know how the virus behaves, how it spreads, and which groups are in danger. We know now that his virus is primarily dangerous to old people, and to people with a history of chronic disease, and those who are immunocompromised.”
Appealing to Israeli leaders “who are appearing every night at 8 p.m. to announce all kinds of steps, some of them very important,” he said, they should “first and foremost calm people down.”
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