On Monday, a group of researchers from Imperial College London published important new results on the virus du jour in Lancet Infectious Diseases. Imperial College’s epidemiologists have the close attention of the world right now. If you are following virus news, and what other kind is there, you’ll recall how Imperial College scholars issued a memo that diverted the U.K. from following a course of grin-and-bear-it antivirus policy involving little or no behaviour modification by the British public.
Almost every developed country is more or less following the strict Imperial College-recommended path now, and the institution has become a source of reassurance, insisting that social distancing and the outlawing of mass assemblies are working. In another report also issued Monday, researchers estimate that behaviour changes have already saved 59,000 lives in 11 western European countries. This number, like everything else about a young epidemic, is likely to grow with quasi-exponential force.
The Lancet paper represents the best possible attempt, right now, to quantify the severity of COVID-19. This is a notoriously difficult trick in the early stages of a new epidemic disease. Estimates of case-fatality rates, and other parameters of urgent interest, can start out wildly high because early surveillance is only identifying the most severe cases. Those estimates require a lot of infected people, including ones who have experienced the full course of the disease, before they firm up.
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