New Imperial College report suggests by end of June, Bangladesh daily death rate will be about 700

A 1 June report from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis based at Imperial College estimates (on the basis of Bangladesh official death data of 29 May) that the likely number of daily deaths at the end of June will be around 700. [In June 2nd report, this estimate has been reduced to about 550. Every day there is a new report published on the same link provided]

The reason for this increase from the current daily rate, which averaged last week at 26, is because the MRC report estimates the R number (or reproduction number) of the virus in Bangladesh to be at the moment about 1.59.

The R number signifies the average number of people that one infected person will pass the virus to. An R number of 1.5 means that 100 people infect 150, who would in turn infect 225, who would themselves infect 338. In three rounds of infection, the total number of people with the virus would have more than quintrupled from 100 to a total of 588. Each round of infection takes about 3 days, according to the MRC report. So from 100 people on day 1, you have a total of 588 people on day 9. And after 30 days you have a total of 11,333 infections created.

The official number of those who were tested positive to the virus in Bangladesh on May 29th was 2,523. On the basis of an R number of 1.5 and with each round of infection taking 3 days, after 30 days these 2,523 infections would result in a total of 285,932 infections.

For every 100 infections there is likely to be one death. This particular cohort of infections, arising from just that one day, would result in a total of about 2,859 deaths over a stretched period of time — as it takes around 20 days between a person getting infected and a person dying. This is why MRC is estimating that at end of June there will be about 700 new deaths [or 550, according to June 2nd report].

The only way to decrease the R number, and to decrease the number of new infections and hence deaths, is to stop the spread of the virus, and the way to do this is by increasing the strictness of socially distancing measures.

This should be a wake-up call to the Bangladesh government.

* This blog was updated to provide the number of estimated deaths in June 2nd report.
* A correction was also made to the number of estimated deaths from the cohort of infections.

/DB