People in America and Great Britain should prepare for an 18-month pandemic that will kill 500,000 in the UK and more than 2-million Americans before it completes the first wave of infections in an outbreak that could keep returning before herd immunity takes hold, according to a new study by London’s Imperial College. 

Key projections from the study include:

• An overwhelming of America’s critical care hospital beds by April 11 and an eventual 30 times overload of intensive care capacity before infections peak.

• An eventual 81% infection rate in both the U.S. and Britain with 510,000 deaths in Britain and 2.2-million dead in the U.S.

• NO available vaccine for 18-months minimum.

• World mortality rates similar to the 1918 H1N1 (Spanish Flu) outbreak.

• Five months of complete social isolation considered ideal to minimize the virus spread.

  READ MORE FROM THE STUDY HERE. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and government response to it has already touched off feverish political debate in America between civil libertarians wary of encroaching government power over individual freedoms and a burgeoning medical crisis that finds viral spread suppression via social isolation and the mitigation of public human contact as the only available measures to combat the spread of the disease.

From the Imperial College study:

“We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.”

Church congregations, patriot groups and some in the independent media are deciding that the “cure” for COVID-19 is worse than the disease, vowing not to go along with guidelines for self quarantine and social distancing, even as debate rages inside the government over the legality of martial law and forcibly keeping populations isolated in their homes until the outbreak subsides.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump took the rare step of invoking emergency powers to marshal critical medical supplies against the coronavirus pandemic. Trump also signed an aid package — which the Senate approved earlier Wednesday — that will guarantee sick leave to workers who fall ill.

Trump tapped his authority under the 70-year-old Defense Production Act to give the government more power to steer production by private companies and try to overcome shortages in masks, ventilators and other supplies.

Yet he seemed to minimize the urgency of the decision, later tweeting that he “only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future.”

“Hopefully there will be no need,” he added, “but we are all in this TOGETHER!”