rationeel schreef op 18 maart 2020 19:26:
Nobel laureate: surprised if Israel has more than five coronavirus deaths
Israeli Nobel Prize winner... Michael Levitt... has predicted that no more than ten Israelis will succumb to COVID-19 – and even less with the new restrictions – since the number of cases is so few.
No more than 10 people will die in Israel as a result of the novel coronavirus disease known as COVID-19, Nobel Prize laureate Michael Levitt predicted on Wednesday as the government continued to impose additional restrictions on the general population.
Levitt said that fears in Israel over the coronavirus were... disproportionate... to the threat, and that the number of cases in the country was uncertain due to reporting variances. "I will be surprised if the number of deaths in Israel surpasses 10," he said, adding that the Jewish state was ..."not on the world map for the disease."...
Levitt has risen to prominence in recent weeks thanks to his successful forecast of the... slowdown... in the.. rate of infection in mainland China... last month. By looking at... statistics... emerging on the ...number of people ...infected... and the number of deaths,... Levitt... identified a bounded growth pattern,... showing... that instead of the rate... of infection... increasing exponentially,... it started to tail off...
An American-British-Israeli biophysicist who won the ...2013 Nobel Prize for chemistry,... Levitt ...predicted earlier this week that there will be... no new infections in China... by the end of March...
Speaking to Kan's Reshet Bet radio on Wednesday, Levitt, who lives part-time in... Tel Aviv,... said that on a... global scale.., the number of cases in Israel is very small...
Officially, Israel has reported 427 cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
"I don't believe the numbers in Israel, not because they're made up, but because the... definition... of a case in Israel keeps changing and it's hard to evaluate the numbers that way," Levitt said.