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A surgeon treating people in wars and disasters has warned that millions of people could die from COVID-19 in low-income countries.
David Nott, a Welsh trauma surgeon who has volunteered in crisis and conflict zones, says there is only little time left before the most vulnerable parts of the planet are hit by coronavirus.
He has written an article about COVID-19 for The Lancet journal warning that action must be taken now or the consequences will be dire.
Speaking to Sky News on Saturday, Dr. Nott said: “We really need to start doing something to overcome this. If we don’t, there will be millions of people [dying]”
In the document, he said: “The main positive influences in reducing the number of deaths from COVID-19 have been hand washing, social distancing and confinement.
“For the most vulnerable people on this planet, such strategies are not an option. People living in conflict zones or in refugee camps cannot physically distance themselves, cannot isolate themselves, have inadequate washing facilities, and often do not they have access to health care.
“In fragile environments, there is no massive infrastructure like the NHS. There are few fans … there is no oxygen by pipeline, power outages are common, and the capacity of the health workforce is unlikely to be sufficient to cope. With a small number of COVID-19 cases, the potential for thousands of deaths from this disease doesn’t matter. “
The most vulnerable countries, he said, were places like Yemen, Chad, northern Syria and South Sudan.
Speaking on Sky, he added: “David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee recently surveyed 34 fragile countries using the same type of modeling used by Imperial [College London].
“In these countries, he said there will be between 500 million and one billion infections.”
Dr. Nott said IRC had estimated that there will likely be between 1.7 and 3.2 million deaths, which he said probably “if we don’t do something about it now.”
The surgeon said: “There was a document written by Dr. Wu from China that came out in The Lancet on January 30, really saying that this will be a pandemic and that we really should be prepared for something terrible.”
“I really don’t think anybody noticed that, so for four weeks it was a time when we probably should have been prepared.”
Dr. Nott’s document says that people around the world, in poor countries, have a period of time when the coronavirus will not affect them.
He said, “We can’t wait any longer, we have to do something in the next four to five weeks.”
“We cannot wait another four or five weeks because they will be in exactly the same position we have been in.”
“We have a short period of time to get it right.”
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He stated that the only way to contain the coronavirus is by helping fragile, low-income countries to avoid widespread epidemics.
“If we don’t, it will get out of hand and bite us again in the future,” he said.
Dr. Nott said that all countries were doing what they considered necessary to combat the virus, but that the world needs to work together, and that potentially a world leader explains to other countries: “There is no option in this, there is no other option “.
So far, there have been more than 3.4 million coronavirus cases worldwide and at least 240,000 coronavirus-related deaths.
