From Downing Street to isolation for UK professor who swayed Covid-19 response

A British professor who was in Downing Street this week after convincing Prime Minister Boris Johnson to stiffen his response to the coronavirus outbreak has self-isolated after developing a persistent dry cough and a fever.

Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, produced a projection of the coronavirus outbreak for the British government and was in Downing Street on Monday. "Sigh. Developed a slightly dry but persistent cough yesterday and self-isolated even though I felt fine," Ferguson said. "Then developed a high fever at 4 am today. There is a lot of COVID-19 in Westminster," he said on Twitter.

It was not immediately clear if Ferguson had met Johnson face to face although the professor attended Johnson's news conference. In his study, Ferguson compared the potential impact of the COVID-19 disease epidemic with the devastating flu outbreak of 1918 and said that with no mitigating measures at all, the outbreak could have caused more than half a million deaths in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States.