
Shocking charts show how the UK Government could prevent hundreds or even thousands of deaths by taking dramatic action now to fight the killer coronavirus and 'flatten the curve' of its spiralling epidemic.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson today decided not to move forward in Britain's fight against COVID-19, declining to close schools, send people home from work or ban large gatherings.

But he is coming under intense scrutiny for refusing to budge – one frustrated scientist warned: 'Now is the time for the UK government to ban large gatherings, ask people to stop non-essential travel, recommend employers shift to home working and ramp up the response.'

Official advice currently doesn't go much further than telling citizens to wash their hands even though the UK now has more cases than China did when Wuhan's 11million people were forced into lockdown.

Scientists and critics are urging the Government to do more to prolong an inevitable surge in cases, saying that a spike of infections could cripple the NHS but spreading the cases over a longer period of time would 'flatten the curve' and make it easier for the nation to cope.

An analysis of statistics has shown that areas that acted fast have slashed their death rates by up to eight times compared to those who react after the virus has taken hold.

In South Korea, for example, an area home to 2.5million people was put into lockdown when just 204 people had been diagnosed and one had died. The country now has a death rate of just 0.8 per cent despite more than 7,800 cases.

But in Italy, large-scale lockdowns were not brought in until Sunday, March 8, by which time it had more than 5,800 patients. There are now almost 12,500 and 827 deaths – a death rate of 6.6 per cent.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic in the US in 1918, Philadelphia, PA, had a 'spiked' death rate of more than 250 per 100,000 people because it took two weeks to stop public gatherings, whereas St Louis, Missouri, brought them in straight away and kept its 'flattened' death rate below 60 per 100,000.

UK officials are reportedly even hoping that the outbreak – which they've admitted will infect thousands of people – will go through so many healthy people without killing them that the country will start to build up herd immunity to protect the vulnerable, who must be kept safe during the worst of the outbreak.

Experts have slammed the UK's lack of action over its 590 coronavirus cases and said that efforts to stop or delay an outbreak could 'flatten the curve' of the epidemic, spreading the peak of cases over a longer period of time to prevent sudden large spike in cases which could cripple hospitals (dotted line indicates hospitals' maximum capacity)

This graph shows how St Louis, Missouri, kept its death rate significantly lower by starting social distancing measures immediately after the first cases of flu were discovered. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, however, allowed a city parade to go ahead and took two weeks to bring in the same measures – as a result its death rate was considerably higher

Silicon Valley businessman Tomas Pueyo found that the number of coronavirus cases stayed low in Chinese provinces outside of Wuhan because they were sent into total lockdown as soon as the virus became a threat. South Korea, Italy and Iran, however, did not act quickly enough and are now home to the world's worst epidemics

The number of cases of coronavirus outside of China is soaring. Outbreaks are hitting some countries particularly hard because authorities are reluctant to start drastic measures like stopping travel, sending workers home and shutting schools because they will damage the economy

Many countries which didn't put dramatic measures in place when they saw their first cases have started to see huge surges in the numbers of patients and face big decisions about how to stop the disease from spreading

At least a dozen countries are seeing such fast rises in the numbers of coronavirus patients that they could reasonably be expected to see outbreaks on similar scales to Italy and Iran in the coming weeks, Mr Pueyo said – those two countries are currently hosting the worst outbreaks in the world as China's situation comes under control

WHAT ARE HARD-HIT COUNTRIES DOING TO STOP THE CORONAVIRUS? World Health Organization director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, applauded the efforts Italy, South Korea and Iran have been making to try and stop the coronavirus. Here's what they're doing: Italy Italy's government has this week put the entire country into a lockdown. Citizens have been told not to travel out of their hometowns unless it is necessary, and face jail time if they try to break the rules. They are allowed out to go shopping and to go to work in some cases. Schools, museums, sports events and large gatherings have all been closed or cancelled to stop people coming together in crowds. The country is urging all tourists who are there to leave and return to their home countries. South Korea South Korea has been hailed as a success in its coronavirus response as it appears to have managed to stem a rapidly spiralling outbreak. Thousands of people were infected there in a short space of time but the country locked down the worst-hit cities – Daegu and Cheongdo – and ramped up testing and isolation protocols. The nation quickly upgraded its response to a high alert level and was meticulous in tracing the contacts of its confirmed cases and testing and isolating them, too. Rapid diagnostic tests have been available there since mid-January, Pharmaceutical Technology reports. It issued stay-home notices to citizens in Cheongdo and Daegu and sent the cities into shutdown while officials tracked down coronavirus patients. Iran Iran has also seen a devastating surge in coronavirus cases in a short time but has told its citizens to stop travelling around the country. The country's national airline has stopped all flights to Europe and the authorities have closed all schools and universities, stopped large events and sports matches, and cut people's working hours to try and reduce travel and slow down the spread of the virus. There are roadblocks with checks on people travelling around the city of Qom, where the outbreak started, The Guardian reported. Advertisement

Tomas Pueyo, a Silicon Valley businessman, has created a series of graphs using official data from China and the US and warned trends in the worst-hit countries suggest the killer infection is 'coming at exponential speed'.

He said preparation is key and the statistics show that places that have taken dramatic action early on in their outbreaks are the ones with the lowest death rates.

Professor Martin Hibberd, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: 'The UK response has clearly not been sufficient, as numbers are continuing to climb and we are at risk of following the trajectory of other European countries.

'If the aim is simply to delay the peak of the outbreak till the summer, then perhaps the UK response is enough.

'However, WHO is challenging the world to do more and we know from China that aggressive curtailment policies can work to reduce numbers.'

Countries close to England have now started to make major moves to try and protect themselves from the fast-escalating crisis.

Ireland today announced it would close all schools, despite having fewer than 50 cases; the US will ban all non-American travellers coming into the country from Europe's free movement zone; and even Scotland announced it will advise against gatherings larger than 500 people from Monday.

Professor Devi Sridhar, from the University of Edinburgh, said: 'Now is the time for the UK government to ban large gatherings, ask people to stop non-essential travel, recommend employers shift to home working and ramp up the response.

'The curve can be shifted (like South Korea and Singapore) but only with government action.'

South Korea was well-prepared for its outbreak, which has been one of the worst in the world, and put two large areas into lockdown – Daegu and Cheongdo – as soon as cases started to spiral after a 'super-spreader' triggered an outbreak in a church.

As a result, the nation has one of the lowest death rates of any country with a severe outbreak.

As well as South Korea, Chinese provinces outside of Hubei, set a good example of how lockdowns can reduce deaths.

Combined they are expected to have a death rate of around 0.9 per cent when their cases are resolved, according to Mr Pueyo.

Most of China was quickly thrown into complete lockdown after the virus exploded in Wuhan and areas outside of the ground zero Hubei province have considerably lower death rates, and far lower numbers of cases.

Italy, however, did not begin a major lockdown until last week, when it already had more than 5,000 patients to deal with, and in January had even stopped testing people with symptoms.

Because of this it has been brought to its knees by the worst outbreak outside of China – more than 12,000 people have caught the virus and at least 827 have died, meaning it has the world's highest death rate (6.6 per cent).

Mr Pueyo said his research had showed 'countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%'. The true fatality rate, which will become clear when China's outbreak ends, is believed to be around 2-3 per cent.

Although China's outbreak has been slowing dramatically since the end of February, cases continue to rise worldwide because of disastrous epidemics in Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, France, Germany and the US

Countries which reacted to outbreaks rather than preparing for them have been hit harder by epidemics, data shows

The government's battle plan has been divided into four stages – 'Contain', 'delay', 'research' and 'mitigate'

His research is based on official government case counts from around the world, statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and information published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Governments around the world – particularly in Western Europe – are battling to contain fast-spreading outbreaks.

Cases outside of China, where the outbreak began in December, have risen 13-fold in the space of a fortnight due to spiralling crises in Italy, Spain, Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe.

Spain and France, in particular, have escalated dramatically this week, now totalling more than 4,500 cases between them. Madrid alone has more than twice as many cases than the UK.

Mr Pueyo said countries should have taken more heed of what happened in China and how the country halted its own devastating outbreak, which appears to be starting to come to an end.

'South Korea, Italy and Iran had a full month to learn, but didn’t, he wrote on Medium. 'They started the same exponential growth [as] Hubei and passed every Chinese region before the end of February.'

Other countries have arguably had even longer than those three nations, but many are not taking the drastic but necessary lockdown measures until it's too late, Mr Pueyo argued.

Ireland has today announced all schools and colleges will be closed to stop the virus spreading – the country has only had 43 confirmed cases and one death so far but Prime Minister Leo Varadkar announced the fast-moving measure today.

Meanwhile, US president Donald Trump said people will no longer be allowed to fly into the US from the European Union unless they are an American citizen or a close relative.

A statement from the US Department of Homeland Security added: 'While these new travel restrictions will be disruptive to some travelers, this decisive action is needed to protect the American public from further exposure to the potentially deadly coronavirus.'

WHAT IS HERD IMMUNITY? UK officials are reportedly considering isolating and protecting vulnerable people such as the elderly in care homes and waiting for the coronavirus to spread through the healthy population until people develop herd immunity and the epidemic runs out of steam. Herd immunity is a situation in which a population of people is protected from a disease because so many of them are unaffected by it that it cannot spread. To cause an outbreak a disease-causing bacteria or virus must have a continuous supply of potential victims who are not immune to it. Immunity is when your body knows exactly how to fight off a certain type of infection because it has encountered it before, either by having the illness in the past or through a vaccine. When a virus or bacteria enters the body the immune system creates substances called antibodies, which are designed to destroy one specific type of bug. When these have been created once, some of them remain in the body and the body also remembers how to make them again. This provides long-term protection, or immunity, against an illness. If nobody is immune to an illness – as was the case at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak – it can spread like wildfire. However, if, for example, half of people have developed immunity – from a past infection or a vaccine – there are only half as many people the illness can spread to. As more and more people become immune the bug finds it harder and harder to spread until its pool of victims becomes so small it can no longer spread at all. The threshold for herd immunity is different for various illnesses, depending on how contagious they are – for measles, around 95 per cent of people must be vaccinated to it spreading. For polio, which is less contagious, the threshold is about 80-85 per cent, according to the Oxford Vaccine Group. Advertisement

Dr David Halpern, head of the UK's Behavioural Insights Team dubbed Britain's 'Nudge Unit' who reports directly to Mr Johnson, has suggested the 500,000 people in UK care homes or with respiratory conditions could be the only people protected.

He has suggested the virus can be beaten by letting it spread through healthy people to kill it off rather than a nationwide lockdown that could allow coronavirus to rise again later in the year.

Dr Halpern revealed ministers are considering a policy of keeping high-risk groups such as the elderly or those with underlying health conditions isolated in care homes or in their own homes over the coming months.

He said: 'There's going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don't catch the disease.

'By the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population'.

Herd immunity is a situation in which a population of people is protected from a disease because so many of them are unaffected by it that it cannot spread.

To cause an outbreak a disease-causing bacteria or virus must have a continuous supply of potential victims who are not immune to it – this pool of people gets smaller as the illness spreads further.

Deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries was asked on the BBC if 'pretty much everyone will get it eventually'.

'The thing about a new virus is, of course, nobody has antibodies ready-made to it. This virus is having a field day, the desire will be to infect as many people as it can,' she said.

Dr Harries said it was possible that 'up to 80 per cent of the population' could contract the virus, but added that it was a 'very high estimate'.

Experts have caveated calls for more action with a warning that taking drastic action too soon also has its drawbacks.

Any measures that are taken will have to be sustained for a number of weeks for them to work, and there is a risk that using up options too soon means the outbreak could come after, causing extra disruption.

Officials must be sure that they take the biggest steps just before a tipping point at which the epidemic spirals out of control. Italy appears to have missed its chance.

Dr Mike Turner, director of science at the research charity the Wellcome Trust, said: 'There is an incredibly difficult balancing act going on. Being too slow to react has potentially dangerous consequences.

'Over-reacting is also potentially dangerous, though for different reasons.

'And the core difficulty is that we are still learning about this virus and what is similar to things we know about other coronaviruses and things that are different.

'There is limited evidence that closing schools and postponing sporting fixtures makes much material difference.

'Each country is making the best call they can on such issues with limited information and there is no ‘correct’ answer here. Even if there were, a ‘correct’ answer today may not be tomorrow because events are changing so rapidly.'

Analysis of the rates at which case numbers are increasing in Western nations suggest many countries will have more than 2,000 infected patients by the middle of March, with France and the US potentially being among the worst hit places

The numbers of new daily coronavirus cases were rising rapidly in Hubei, the province where the outbreak started, until the region was thrown into lockdown on January 22/23, after which they started to fall at a similar pace

Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, has a fairly high death rate because it was ground zero of the outbreak and authorities had to play catch-up for weeks before the rest of the country could be locked down and the city quarantined

Italy has a high fatality rate in part because it has an elderly population – approximately the fifth oldest in the world – and also because it was not well prepared for the outbreak which is now raging in a relatively small area in the north

South Korea has an extraordinarily low fatality rate because it shut down an area home to more than two million people when there were only around 200 confirmed cases in the country and meticulously traced and isolated everyone linked to confirmed patients