The UK could already have had 1.8million coronavirus patients with one in every 37 people having caught the disease, according to scientists.
In Spain a staggering one in every seven people – 7.5million citizens – are predicted to have had the COVID-19 illness already, along with 10 per cent of Italians.
Researchers at Imperial College London, led by government adviser Professor Neil Ferguson, have studied coronavirus outbreaks across Europe to predict their true scales.
Professor Ferguson has been one of the foremost British experts since the outbreak began and it was his work that persuaded the Government to order a lockdown.
He and colleagues now suggest that an average of four per cent of people in 11 of the Europe’s wealthiest countries have been infected – some 19million people.
They made the predictions as an alternative to ‘highly unrepresentative’ official figures which are based largely on tests done in hospitals.
Many millions of people are believed to have caught the virus and recovered at home, putting the infection tolls in the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Norway considerably higher than the World Health Organization total of 366,000.
The Imperial College London team based their predictions on how many people have died in each country with COVID-19, and also the lockdown measures each place has put in and when they started them
Professor Ferguson and his colleagues wrote in their report: ‘The ECDC [European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control] provides information on confirmed cases and deaths attributable to COVID-19.
‘However, the case data are highly unrepresentative of the incidence of infections due to underreporting as well as systematic and country-specific changes in testing.
‘We, therefore, use only deaths attributable to COVID-19 in our model; we do not use the ECDC case estimates at all.’
As well as considering how many people have died with the coronavirus in each country, the Imperial team also looked at what types of lockdown measures each country has brought in and when they started them.
The stricter and the sooner they began, the smaller proportion of people are likely to have become infected.
The country with the lowest estimated infections was Norway, where only 0.41 per cent of its 5.5million people are thought to have caught the coronavirus (approximately 22,400 people).
In Germany the rate of infection was thought to be 0.72 per cent (577,000 people), according to the data which was estimated for March 28.
Besides Spain and Italy, which had a combined estimate of around 13.6million people infected, no other country’s toll was higher than four per cent.
In Belgium it was thought to be 3.7 per cent (433,600 people); in Switzerland 3.2 per cent (269,000); Sweden 3.1 per cent (316,200); France 3 per cent (2.035million); UK 2.7 per cent (1.775m); Austria 1.1 per cent (97,400) and Denmark 1.1 per cent (64,500).
The official number of cases recorded in all 11 countries in the research is just 365,734, by comparison.
Writing in the paper, the team said: ‘We estimate that there have been many more infections than are currently reported.
‘The high level of under-ascertainment of infections that we estimate here is likely due to the focus on testing in hospital settings rather than in the community.
‘Despite this, only a small minority of individuals in each country have been infected…
‘Our estimates imply that the populations in Europe are not close to herd immunity (50-75%).’
The paper by Imperial College intended to work out how effective lockdowns and social distancing measures would be at protecting people.
It predicts that the lockdown in Italy – which has the highest death toll of any country in the world – may have saved 38,000 lives.
The study has not been reviewed by other scientists or published in a journal.
COUNTRY | ESTIMATED % OF POPULATION INFECTED |
POPULATION (CIA World Factbook) |
ESTIMATED # OF CASES |
OFFICIAL # OF CASES (World Health Organization) |
DEATH RATE |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Spain | 15% | 50,015,792 | 7,502,368 | 85,195 | 8.6% |
Italy | 9.80% | 62,402,659 | 6,115,460 | 101,739 | 11.4% |
Belgium | 3.70% | 11,720,716 | 433,666 | 11,899 | 4.3% |
Switzerland | 3.20% | 8,403,994 | 268,927 | 15,412 | 1.9% |
Sweden | 3.10% | 10,202,491 | 316,277 | 4,028 | 3.6% |
France | 3% | 67,848,156 | 2,035,444 | 43,977 | 6.9% |
United Kingdom | 2.70% | 65,761,117 | 1,775,550 | 25,150 | 7.1% |
Austria | 1.10% | 8,859,446 | 97,453 | 9,618 | 1.1% |
Denmark | 1.10% | 5,869,410 | 64,563 | 2,577 | 3% |
Germany | 0.72% | 80,159,662 | 577,149 | 61,913 | 0.9% |
Norway | 0.41% | 5,467,439 | 22,416 | 4,226 | 0.6% |
TOTAL/AVERAGE | 4% | 376,710,882 | 19,209,279 | 365,734 | 4.49% |