Coronavirus: Half the Northern Irish population getting Covid-19 ‘is not a wild guess’ says viral expert doctor

Dr Connor Bamford, a research academic at Queen’s University Belfast, suggested this is a “likely scenario” – adding that it could be the world’s worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which the NHS says killed perhaps 50 million people globally.

Dr Bamford (whose PhD focussed on mumps) was speaking today just as the Department of Health revealed another two coronavirus patients.

If further tests confirm the cases as expected, it means there were 18 people in the Province with the virus – officially called Covid-19 – as of 2pm today.

The two new cases are both adults and are linked to a previously-reported case involving recent travel to north Italy.

Dr Bamford’s analysis echoes the words of health minister Robin Swann on Monday, when he told the Assembly “the scientific advice that we are getting is that we can expect anything from 50% to 80% of the population to be infected by Covid-19”.

Mr Bamford said: “A significant portion of the population will be affected. It’s not going to be 1%. It’s going to be much larger than that.

“I think that is the consensus. At the moment what we’re trying to do is slow that down... [but] this virus has the capacity to infect everybody. I think we have to realise that.”

An infection rate of 50% of the entire Northern Irish population would “not be a wild speculation” he said.

“The vast majority of cases are relatively mild,” he said.

“The ones who have the very severe, fatal disease are going to be older individuals with significant underlying health conditions.

“The real fear is that if this comes too quickly it can overwhelm any health service, any society and any economy, and that can actually be a contributing factor to damage downstream. So really at the minute what we want to do at the moment is just slow this down.”

Could the virus be stopped?

“Ultimately at the minute probably not,” he said.

“I think it’s just going to be too hard to completely contain it. Even in other countries it’s already past that containment, such as Italy.”

It may be possible to devise a vaccine, and the heat of summer could also make it harder for the virus to spread – but these things are “very, very difficult to predict”.

He estimated the mortality rate could be roughly 1%, and “that’s pretty bad”.

“This hasn’t technically been called a pandemic, but it very likely is; the World Health Organisation just has chosen not to use that word,” he said.

Mere hours after he spoke to the News Letter it did indeed declare a pandemic.

In terms of potential fatalities, Dr Bamford believes covid-19 could be “the worst pandemic since 1918” (although he added that relatively speaking there have been few pandemics in the last century).