Professor Neil Ferguson, a director at Imperial College, London, said that even with control measures 250,000 people could die in the outbreakLast week, Prof Ferguson told MPs these measures could see the eventual death toll cut to ‘substantially less’ than 20,000. Meanwhile a paper by separate colleagues at Imperial predicted just 5,700 deaths if the lockdown continues. Now a rival academic has claimed Prof Ferguson has a patchy record of modelling epidemics, which could have led to hasty Ministerial decisions. But Prof Ferguson defended Imperial’s foot and mouth work, saying they were doing ‘modelling in real time’ with ‘limited data’. He added: ‘I think the broad conclusions reached were still valid.’His estimate that coronavirus deaths could be ‘substantially less’ than 20,000 was based on ‘the presence of the very intense social distancing and other interventions now in place’.

Source: Daily Mail March 29, 2020 01:36 UTC