The novel coronavirus or COVID-19 may result in around 15 million deaths and have an economic impact of around $2.4 trillion loss of global GDP, said an Australian study.
The virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has already killed 3,300 people and infected more than 95,000. It has spread to 81 other countries so far.
The global death rate currently is 3.4 per cent, higher than the previously predicted 2 per cent.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the outbreak is narrowing.
Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have modelled predictions based on seven scenarios ranging from low to high severity.
In the low-severity model, they have modeled the estimates on the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-1969 that killed around one million people.
In the high-severity model, they took the Spanish flu pandemic as reference, which killed an estimated 17 to 50 million people from 1918 to 1920. The global GDP loss will be as high as $9 trillion in this case and deaths could cross 68 million.
“Our scenarios show that even a contained outbreak could significantly impact the global economy in the short run,” said Professor Warwick McKibbin, a professor of economics at ANU.
“Even in the best-case scenario of a low-severity impact, the economic fallout is going to be enormous and countries need to work together to limit the potential damage as much as possible,” he added.
“There needs to be vastly more investment in public health and development, especially in the poorest countries,” McKibbin said. “It is too late to attempt to close borders once the disease has taken hold in many other countries and a global pandemic has started.”
Data from the Chinese Centre For Disease Control and Prevention showed that a person’s chances of dying from the disease increase with age.
The research also shows that about 80 per cent of COVID-19 cases are mild. Experts think many such cases haven’t been reported because some people aren’t going to doctors.
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