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Still, front-liners are worried, Cloutier said. “They’re worried because they’ve only seen the beginning and they think that if there is a pandemic it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to manage the capacity of the needs of our patients coming through the system.”

Fisman’s team has experience dealing with SARS, H1N1 and Ebola and recently reported that the outbreak in Iran was far larger than originally reported. Among other data, their model estimates basic reproduction numbers — how many other people one infected person is likely to infect — as well as the number of mild and asymptomatic cases that are flying under the radar, believed vastly higher than reported case counts.

“China’s epidemic was controlled through massive quarantine, enforced via threats of death penalty, and with lockdown of 750,000 people at peak,” Fisman said.

In Canada, modest public health control efforts would mean finding and isolating around 50 per cent of mild cases through testing, but no social distancing or quarantine.

More aggressive measures would be the kind of countrywide lockdowns now occurring in Italy, which have left streets in the capital Rome and other cities deserted, as well as school closures and banning of mass gatherings and sporting events.

A new study finds that older people, as well as people with sepsis or underlying clotting problems, are most likely to die from the virus. Published in The Lancet, the study, based on 191 patients from two hospitals in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, also found that people shed the virus for longer than expected, an average of 20 days in survivors, and as many as 37 days. Prolonged shedding suggests people may still be capable of spreading the pathogen.