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WASHINGTON — A computer model of an "ultra severe" flu pandemic shows it would leave more than 140 million people dead worldwide and cost the global economy more than $4 trillion — but that its effect on the economies of the United States and Western Europe would be relatively mild.

In fact, Australian economist Warwick McKibbin said his model of the way different economies respond to a pandemic suggests that capital investment in the United States and Europe will grow as investors flee less-secure economies.

Another computer model, being developed by the National Institutes of Health, suggests that by closing its airports to international flights, the United States could "buy" a few weeks of time to prepare for a pandemic.

The number of American deaths could be dramatically reduced if pandemic preparation plans are put into effect and work is begun on developing a vaccine, according to the NIH's Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) program.

In a recent presentation at the Brookings Institution, McKibbin described his model's results for four pandemic scenarios: mild, patterned after the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" outbreak that is believed to have killed around 700,000 people worldwide; moderate, based on the 1957 pandemic that is estimated to have killed from 1 million to 2 million people; severe, much like the lowest estimates of the severity of the "Spanish Flu" pandemic of 1918-1919, from 25 million to 50 million deaths; and "ultra," a pandemic that spreads and kills as fast as the highest estimates — up to 100 million deaths — of the 1918-19 pandemic.

An ultra pandemic would cause recessions in the developed world, cutting GDP by 5.5 percent in the United States and 8.0 percent in Europe, he said.

On the other hand, such a pandemic would hammer developing countries, he said: The GDP of Indonesia would drop by 18 percent. Output in Singapore would shrink by 22 percent, in the Philippines by 38 percent and in Hong Kong by 54 percent.

McKibbin's studies assumed an emerging influenza strain would attack 30 percent of the population, within the ranges of the rate of spread of all three 20th-century pandemics.