“The coronavirus epidemic is slowing down in China, and will not pose a risk to the majority of people, an Israeli Nobel Prize laureate has said.
Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who won the 2013 Nobel prize for chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” has become something of a household name in China over the last few months. Although his specialty is not in epidemiology, he accurately forecast the slowing down of the spread of the virus in February, giving hope to those affected by the lockdown.
But on February 7, something changed. “The number of new infections started to drop linearly and did not stop,” Levitt said. “A week later, the same happened with the number of the deaths. This dramatic change in the curve marked the median point and enabled better prediction of when the pandemic will end. Based on that, I concluded that the situation in all of China will improve within two weeks. And, indeed, now there are very few new infection cases.”
Looking at the picture globally, Levitt was reticent to make predictions country-by-country as to when the spread of the virus will slow. China is nearing the point at which the number of new infections will be zero, while South Korea had already moved past the median point, and was starting to see a slow down in new infection rates.”
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-nobel-laureate-Coronavirus-spread-is-slowing-621145
