A Nobel laureate scientist has claimed that the UK's coronavirus lockdown has caused more deaths than it saved.
Michael Levitt, of Stanford University in California, believes that Prof Neil Ferguson's modelling exaggerated the UK's potential Covid-19 death toll by "10 or 12 times", the Telegraph reports.
The Imperial College professor had warned that the UK could suffer 500,000 deaths if no action was taken, prompting Boris Johnson to announce a nationwide lockdown on March 23.
But Prof Levitt says the Government should have instead told Brits to wear face masks and opt for other social distancing measures.
"I think lockdown saved no lives," Prof Levitt told the paper.
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"I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few road accident lives - things like that - but social damage - domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism - has been extreme. And then you have those who were not treated for other conditions."
Prof Levitt, a British-American-Israeli scientist, jointly won the Nobel for chemistry in 2013 for the "development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Although not an epidemiologist, he has been following the coronavirus pandemic since cases first began emerging in China and on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
In a paper, the 73-year-old has argued that the virus does not spread exponentially in the way many experts fear.
Instead, he calculates that most countries will suffer a Covid-19 death rate roughly equivalent to an extra month in excess deaths.
In the UK, he predicted that by March 14 around 50,000 lives would be lost.
Describing lockdown as a "very blunt and very medieval" weapon, he says the virus has now "saturated" in much of Europe.
"I think that the real virus was the panic virus. For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked and I think there was a huge lack of discussion," he continued.
He added that there is evidence to suggest that coronavirus weakens in dry heat, and that in many western countries patients have developed "some kind of immunity".
