Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for "developing complex models of chemical systems," has a new prediction for the coronavirus prediction after he foresees China's COVID-19 cases slowing down in the past.
Now, Levitt has predicted the "end of the [coronavirus] pandemic is near," as per Swarajya.
A Nobel Laureate's Prediction About China
According to the Los Angeles Times, Levitt began looking at the numbers of COVID-19 cases around the world back in January and saw that China had 46 new deaths on Jan. 31, which was slightly higher compared to the 42 deaths the day before.
"This suggests that the rate of increase in a number of the deaths will slow down even more over the next week," Levitt predicted on Feb. 1, which was widely shared around Chinese social media.
After he posted his prediction, the number of deaths has indeed decreased each day.
A Prediction That Came True
Three weeks later, Levitt also predicted that the peak of the virus's growth has already peaked and that China will have around 80,000 cases and approximately 3,250 deaths.
Amazingly, Levitt's prediction was rather accurate as China has a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths as of Mar. 16.
China has most recently confirmed 39 new cases of coronavirus infection this Sunday, which was down from the 46 confirmed cases a day before--and all of them were travelers from abroad, so that means there is no new community spread cases since Wednesday last week.
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Is the End Near? Yes, According to Levitt
Now, the Nobel laureate has made another coronavirus prediction: there will be similar outcomes for the rest of the world, including the United States.
This goes against the dire predictions of many epidemiologists that there will be millions of deaths around the world, and the coronavirus pandemic will remain for months or even years, including British epidemiologist Dr. Neil M. Ferguson that the US will see 2.2 million deaths, as per the New York Times.
However, Levitt says the data does not support these situations, especially for places that have put in place reasonable precautionary measures like social distancing and even for ones that haven't instilled stricter measures as China did.
The data Levitt talked about was from 78 countries that have more than 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
From the data he analyzed, Levitt is seeing "signs of recovery" after checking the number of new cases per day instead of the cumulative cases, as well as the percentage of growth each day.
"Numbers are still noisy, but there are clear signs of slowed growth," he claimed, but he did admit that his figures are messy.
"We're Going to be Fine"
Still, even with the incomplete data, he believes that the consistent decline could only mean that there are factors at work and not just some noise in the numbers.
Levitt further says that what we truly need to control is the panic and emphasized on the importance of social distancing and banning any large social gathering, especially as the vaccine may still take months to arrive.
Lastly, Levitt said that in the grand scheme, "we're going to be fine."
