U.S. officials said the report, which projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the nation, influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.
The report reached new alarming conclusions because of the latest data from Italy, which has seen a spiraling rate of infections, swamping hospitals and forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who to treat.
It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.
With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policy.
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