Coronavirus pandemic: CDC's worst-case projection sees 1.7 million Americans die and over 214 million infected
Officials from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) and experts on epidemics around the world took part in a conference call last month about what might happen in the United States should the COVID-19 virus spread in the country.
Matthew Biggerstaff, a CDC epidemiologist, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause, according to the New York Times.
The worst-case scenarios take into account no action taken to slow the transmission and as such has not included measures taken across the country so far. According to the one projection, between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic which could last months or over a year. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.
The CDC's scenarios also project that between 2.4 million and 21 million people in the country could require hospitalization which could prove debilitating for the nation's medical system
2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system as according to the 2018 American Hospital Association (AHA) survey shows that the country just has 924,107 staffed hospital beds.
The new data projects higher figures than other estimates. Dr. James Lawler, infectious disease and public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, has projected that 96 million Americans would contract COVID-19, five million of whom would require hospitalization. Lawler’s conservative estimate was that 480,000 Americans would be killed in that scenario.
Another model by experts at Resolve to Save Lives, a global health nonprofit, and the Council on Foreign Relations found the number of potential deaths could range from as few as 163,500, if the virus is no more deadly than seasonal influenza, to more than 1.6 million if the virus carries a mortality rate of just 1 percent.
Across the world, it is estimated that between 20 percent and 60 percent of everyone on earth — or between 1.4 billion and 4.2 billion people — could eventually contract the disease, according to five researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
As of writing, around 150,000 people had been infected with the virus, with 5429 deaths reported. The figure for the US stands at 2147 infections and at least 51 deaths.