Back in March and April, while the world seemed to be shutting down around us all even though few people had even seen someone with symptoms, many felt that the emergency health measures were over-reactions. And back then, there were voice speaking up, mostly in circulated infographics and memes, to let us know that success would, in fact, make the measures look like overkill. If the measures we were all taking panned out, hospitals would never overflow, patients would never be left to drown in their own fluids without a ventilator, and most of us would never get sick.

Science is now confirming; this is essentially what happened.

Scientists from Imperial College London and University of California-Berkeley both published studies in early June examining the impact of the emergency health measures such as lockdown, heavy testing, and isolation taken in seventeen different countries.

The Berkeley study looked at infection rates, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and lockdown measures in several of the hardest-hit countries; China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the United States. Their estimation is that at the time of their article’s publication in Nature on May 26th, large-scale anti-contagion policies in those six countries had prevented approximately 530 million infections. By this model and using the global mortality rate, this means those policies have prevented almost 30 million deaths in those countries, which have a combined population of 2.5 billion.

The very slightly more conservative Imperial study, which looked at France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and Norway asserts that the measures currently being taken have prevented 3.1 million deaths in those nations. Using the same stats to extrapolate number of cases from number of deaths, that implies that 55 million infections have been prevented in a population of 358 million.

Broken down to percentages, these articles appear to nearly agree with one another about the potential that COVID-19 had if allowed to run unchecked, and about the efficacy of the measures taken to contain it. Both find, in clear terms, that we did not overreact at all. We’re winning, and if we stay the course, we’ll win all the way.

Source: Good News Network