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They said that if almost everyone wears masks in public places, the death toll can be reduced by half.
According to the most watched forecasting model in the United States, between now and December 1st, nearly 100,000 people in the United States are expected to die from Covid-19. But health experts say that if almost everyone wears masks in public places, the death toll may be reduced by half.
In other words, the amount of coronavirus stocks this fall depends on human behavior.
Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas, said: “Behavior really will determine whether, when and how the current wave will fade away sustainably.” “We can’t stop the development of delta, but we can change our behavior overnight.”
This means doubling down on wearing masks again, restricting social gatherings, staying at home and getting vaccinated when sick. “These things are within our control,” Meyers said.
This summer, the United States is in the fourth wave of infections, powered by the highly contagious delta variant, which has caused another surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Medical centers are overwhelmed, nurses burned and wiped out. The progress in fighting the virus over the past few months.
The average daily death toll exceeds 1,100, and the time goes back to mid-March. An influential model from the University of Washington predicts that 98,000 Americans will die by early December, bringing the total death toll close to 730,000.
The forecast said that by mid-September, the death toll will rise to nearly 1,400 per day, and then slowly decline.
But the model also says that if Americans change their ways, many of these deaths can be avoided.
“Just wearing a mask, we can save 50,000 lives. This is the importance of behavior,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health indicators science at the University of Washington in Seattle, who participated in these predictions.
There are already signs that Americans are taking this threat more seriously.
In the past few weeks of alerts about delta variants, the decline in demand for Covid-19 lenses has reversed direction. In the past month, the number of vaccines vaccinated every day has increased by about 80%, reaching an average of about 900,000 vaccines.
Jeff Zients, White House Covid-19 coordinator, stated that in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, “the number of people who have been injected for the first time in the past month is greater than in the previous two months. The sum is even more”.
In addition, millions of students are required to wear masks. After the federal government fully approved Pfizer’s vaccine earlier this week, more and more employers are requiring their employees to be vaccinated. Cities such as New York and New Orleans insist that people be vaccinated while dining in restaurants.
According to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Public Affairs Research Center, half of American workers support vaccination in their workplace.
Early signs indicate that behavioral changes may have flattened the curve in some places where the virus has ravaged this summer.
An Associated Press analysis shows that the rate of new cases in Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas is slowing, and the first shots in some of these states are rising. In Florida, hospital requests and school anger over masks may prompt some people to take more precautions.
However, disturbing trends continue in Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming, and the number of new infections continues to rise steadily.
Mokdad said he was frustrated that Americans “have not taken steps to control the virus.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “We are on fire and no one wants to deploy a firetruck.”
One explanation: Elizabeth Stewart of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University said that the good news of spring — rising vaccination rates and falling cases — let people see the past, which makes it difficult for them to recover. They think they have left behind precautions.
“We don’t need to sit still,” she said, “but we can make some risk-reducing choices.”
Dr. Gaby Sauza, 30, of Seattle, said that even people who have been vaccinated should be vigilant. He was vaccinated during the winter but tested positive for Covid-19.
Sauza is a pediatric resident. She will be absent from the hospital for two weeks and feel guilty for burdening her colleagues. She believes that the vaccine kept her infection under control, even though she suffered several days of body pain, fever, night sweats, fatigue, cough and chest pain.
“If we take action, we can contain this virus. If we don’t take action, this virus is waiting for us,” Mokdade said. “It will find the weak among us.”
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