translated from Spanish: Coronavirus: a scientific report radically changed British strategy

A report by the Imperial College of London was key to Boris Johnson changing the strategy with which Britain is facing the coronavirus pandemic. According to the 31 academics who sign the work, if urgent measures such as isolation and social estrangement are not taken, 510,000 people could die in Britain and about 2.2 million in the United States.According to the researchers, strict isolation standards could limit the death toll to “a few thousand or tens of thousands, by avoiding pushing health care services to the limit. The only “viable strategy” is to follow China’s “suppression” model, which involves the isolation of the whole of society. The study, entitled “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID19 mortality and demand for health care”, suggests that there are two strategies: mitigation, which seeks to slow down but not stop the spread of the epidemic, reduce the peak demand for health care and protect those at higher risk of serious illness and suppression, which seeks to reverse epidemic growth, while maintaining a low number of cases and maintaining that situation indefinitely. One of the report’s authors, epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, a member of the scientific team advising Johnson, said he also passed on his findings to the U.S. government. On Monday, Washington announced, like London, new measures of social estrangement. In this note:

Original source in Spanish