A Nobel laureate scientist and a Stanford University professor, Michael Levitt, has claimed that the COVID-19 lockdown would be a waste of time and it could increase death rate instead of saving lives.

Michael Levitt suggested that the decision to keep people indoors was motivated by ‘panic’ rather than the best science.

He said that lockdowns failed to alter the course of the pandemic but have instead ‘destroyed millions of livelihoods’. Levitt’s claims were followed by a JP Morgan report, according to Dailymail UK.

Author Marko Kolanovic, a trained physicist and a strategist for JP Morgan, said governments had been spooked by ‘flawed scientific papers’ into imposing lockdowns which were ‘inefficient or late’ and had little effect.

He said falling infection rates since lockdowns were lifted suggest that the virus ‘likely has its own dynamics’ which are ‘unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures’.

Denmark is among the countries, which has seen its R rate continue to fall after schools and shopping malls re-opened, while Germany’s rate has mostly remained below 1.0 after the lockdown was eased.

Prof Levitt told The Telegraph: ‘I think lockdown saved no lives. 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.’

Professor Levitt, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2013 for the ‘development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems’, has said for two months that most experts predictions about coronavirus are wrong.