According to a recent study, Europe has been able to save over three million lives due to implementing lockdown. The research was done by Imperial College London on Europe coronavirus statistics. They stated that the death toll would have been huge if the lockdown wasn’t levied. However, they also mentioned that only a small proportion of people have been infected. Moreover, they are still “at the beginning of the pandemic.”
Another study state that global lockdown has saved lives in a short span of time, compared to what it has been before. The study was assessed according to restrictions followed by 11 European countries – Belgium, France, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Italy. Spain, UK, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. The results were based on the implementations from the beginning of May. By that time, almost 130,000 lives were already lost in these countries due to coronavirus.
Europe coronavirus statistics
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Researches used a disease modeling approach to forecast how many people could have died if the lockdown wasn’t implemented. The results were given by the same group that guided the United Kingdom to implement lockdown.
An estimated number of 3.2 million lives could have been lost by May 4 if the lockdown measures were not implemented. Almost 470,000 lives have been saved in the UK, 630,000 in Italy, and 690,000 in France.
Dr. Seth Flaxman from Imperial said that lockdown reduced the number of deaths by millions, which would have been tragic if not implemented. The equation made many assumptions and will affect the figures.
Nobody would have taken COVID-19 seriously if lockdown wasn’t implemented. Hospitals would have had many more cases than they can treat. Such cases are happening to many other countries across the world. The study doesn’t take into account health consequences, which might take many years to uncover.
What do they mean by “only the beginning?”
The model suggested that the outbreak would have been over by now as the number of infected people would have hiked up. Almost seven out of 10 people in the UK would have had coronavirus, which would lead to herd immunity and making the virus not spread any longer.
The estimated number of COVID-19 patients across Europe could have been 15 million by the beginning of May. However, only 4% of the population in those countries had been infected. However, claims that the pandemic is over is wrong. Thus, if the lockdown starts to ease out in different places, the number of cases could go high again. Dr. Samir Bhatt said that there is a risk of the second wave that might happen in the following month or two due to mobility.
A different study done by the University of California in Berkley analyzed the impact of lockdown in France, China, Iran, the US, and South Korea. Their reports suggest that the lockdown prevented almost 530 million people from getting the virus.
Just before the lockdown was implemented, the virus was doubling every two days. One of the researchers, Dr. Solomon Hsiang, said that coronavirus has been a “real human tragedy”. However, the global actions to stop the virus from spreading “saved more lives” within a short span of time than ever before.
