Novel coronavirus cases have increased to 93,090 worldwide just in the first week of March. The number of countries affected by the COVID-19 outbreak also grew to 76, with Argentina, Chile, Poland and Ukraine joining the list on Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Despite the rapidly growing cases of COVID-19, the WHO has yet to declare the virus a pandemic. But there has been a looming question of how much worse will the outbreak get.
One scientist believes the new coronavirus could infect between 3.1 billion and 5.5 billion adults in the future. That is because of the lack of effective interventions to prevent or control the spread of the virus, Business Insider reported Wednesday.
"There's a chance that between 40 percent and 70 percent of the world's adult population could end up infected with coronavirus," Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, told Noah Feldman in a Deep Background podcast. "I think that there's a very good chance that were in the beginning of a pandemic."
He explained that the world would only see such number of cases if governments fail to implement strong countermeasures to stop the spread of the virus. Efforts should also include actively isolating and putting possible coronavirus cases into quarantine.
Private organizations can also help control the COVID-19 outbreak. Lipsitch suggested "population-level" interventions such as canceling public gatherings, allowing employees to work from home, among other efforts that would reduce contact between people.
However, the epidemiologist noted that not all of those people would get severely ill or die. Lipsitch estimated that a portion of the affected population would only develop symptoms of COVID-19 and about 1 percent to 2 percent would die of the infection.
The estimates come from the analysis of mathematical and computer models that allowed Lipsitch to map how viruses with a similar level of contagiousness, like the influenza, would spread around the world.
"In the largest two pandemics of the 20th century, around 30 percent to 40 percent of people became symptomatically infected, and that's lower than the total proportion that got infected," he said.
But having billions of people affected by COVID-19 may also have a benefit. Lipsitch said having such number of patients carrying the virus and surviving the disease it causes could lead to herd immunity, which could stop the coronavirus outbreak from growing.
Lipsitch did not include children in his report because health experts have yet to fully understand “what's going on with them" amid the coronavirus outbreak. There is also very little number of children infected with the virus and no deaths were reported in patients younger than 9.
