Coronavirus lockdowns may have cost more lives than they saved, according to a Nobel laureate who accurately predicted when China would peak in the crisis.

Stanford University biophysicist Michael Levitt, a British American Israeli who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, said he believed other health precautions, such as enforcing the use of masks, would have been more effective in combating the pandemic, the Telegraph reported.

“I think lockdown saved no lives.

The 73-year-old has no background as an epidemiologist but has analyzed data from 78 nations with more than 50 reported cases of coronavirus, according to the Telegraph.

From the very first case you see, exponential growth actually slows down very dramatically,” Levitt said.

He was close: China has reported 84,102 cases as of Tuesday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

“The problem with epidemiologists is that they feel their job is to frighten people into lockdown, social distancing,” Levitt said, singling out British epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, who he claims overestimated the potential UK death toll by “10 or 12 times.”.