The world will beat coronavirus faster than most experts expect, provided that social distancing is observed, a Nobel laureate scientist who correctly forecast the pandemic’s trajectory in China has predicted.

Michael Levitt, a British-American-Israeli biophysicist who runs a laboratory at Stanford University in California, believes that official data does not support the dire warnings of millions of deaths and massive global social disruption lasting more than a year.

Instead, lessons from China and from the Diamond Princess — the cruise ship hit by an outbreak of the virus after she left Japan early last month — suggest that aggressive public health measures work and that a large proportion of people have natural immunity.

“What we need to control is the panic,” he told the Los