Coronavirus US Update: Country May Follow Italy's Footsteps And Order A Lockdown

Computer scientists predict that America will be in lockdown in less than two weeks as the country scrambles to contain COVID-19. The prediction comes in the wake of Italy putting its people under lockdown on Tuesday, becoming the first European nation to do so in its bid to curtail the spread of coronavirus infections.

After declaring pockets of the country in lockdown on Monday, Italy expanded its so-called red zones and declared a country-wide lockdown on Tuesday. The country is now the second most coronavirus-infected country in the world with 9,172 cases as of Monday.

In the U.S., 804 are currently infected with the coronavirus and at least 28 have already died from the disease. As fears over the rapidly skyrocketing number of coronavirus cases in the country grow, scientists believe the U.S. government will have to make drastic decisions of its own to contain the virus just as Italy did on Tuesday.

On Monday, Mark Handley, Professor of Networked Systems at UCL in London, shared on Twitter a graph showing the growth figures of coronavirus cases in infected countries, including the U.S., as compared to Italy.

“Everyone else will be Italy in 9-14 days’ time,” he tweeted, suggesting that the U.S. might be in lockdown in a matter of two weeks if the coronavirus crisis continues to unfold across the country in the coming days. The U.S. is 11 days behind Italy in detecting its first few cases.

Dr. John Crane of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo agreed with Handley. In an interview this week, the infectious disease specialist said the world had never dealt with anything like the coronavirus outbreak, so the U.S. should implement new measures to stop it from spreading—even if that means declaring a total lockdown, just like Italy.

“It looks like they’re on the exact same trajectory,” he said. “Italy had an 11.5 day head start. When you have a straight line on a long scale, that signifies exponential growth. It’s not unusual at the beginning for an epidemic like this… when no human being on earth has previous exposure to it and no one has immunity to it,” he added.

Crane also noted that while COVID-19 has a low fatality rate, it still poses a greater risk than influenza since there is no vaccine available yet for the disease. As of Tuesday afternoon, there have already been at least 118,000 cases of the virus worldwide. While more than 65,000 have already recovered, more than 4,000 have already died from the disease.