If Americans would stop complaining about face masks and wear them when they leave their homes, they could save well over 100,000 lives — and perhaps more than half a million — through the end of February, according to a study published Friday in Nature Medicine.
The researchers considered five scenarios for how the COVID-19 pandemic could play out with different levels of mask-wearing and rules about staying home and social distancing. All the scenarios assumed that no vaccine was available, nor any medicines capable of curing the disease.
Consistently, the most effective — not to mention cheapest and easiest — way to reduce deaths was to increase the number of people wearing masks.
As of Sept. 21, only 49% of Americans said they “always” wore a mask in public, according to the study. If U.S. residents do not mask up in increasing numbers, they risk another round of mandatory social distancing measures that could shut businesses and schools around the country, the authors said.
“The potential life-saving benefit of increasing mask use in the coming fall and winter cannot be overstated,” wrote the team from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The forecasts also suggest that if states continue to ease their social distancing mandates and other restrictions despite the recent rise in COVID-19 cases, there could be more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. by the end of February.
As with any modeling study, the five scenarios presented below should be considered a guide, rather than a definitive road map, the researchers emphasized.
“We are not forecasting the future, but rather a range of outcomes we believe are most probable given the scenarios tested and based on the data so far, ” they wrote.
Scenario 1: States continue to remove social distancing measures
AKA: The Do-Nothing Scenario
This is the worst-case scenario among the five the researchers considered. According to their models, this would result in a total of 1,053,206 Americans losing their lives to COVID-19 by Feb. 28 and more than 152 million infections across the country.
That death toll would not be felt equally everywhere, the researchers found. Instead, approximately one-third of the projected losses would occur in just three states. California would be hit hardest, with an estimated 146,501 deaths between Sept. 22 and Feb. 28. Florida would be next, with 66,493 deaths during that period, and Pennsylvania could expect 62,352 deaths.
The team also determined that if the U.S. follows this path, by election day, five states would experience a COVID-19 mortality rate of at least 8 deaths per 1 million each day. (That’s about how bad things were when most states shut down their economies and issued stay-at-home orders in the spring.) Another 35 states would exceed that threshold by Feb. 28.
Scenario 2: States shut down again after reaching 8 deaths per 1 million people per day
AKA: The Bare Minimum Scenario
