Nature, first published in 1869, describes itself as “a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions.”
Its Nature Medicine article published yesterday, October 23, 2020, entitled “Modeling COVID-19 scenarios for the United States” presents a fascinating and sobering (and perhaps somewhat terrifying) forecast. The idea was to explore the potential outcomes from differing levels of social distancing and mask usage. The article is lengthy and demands close attention to its rigorous scientific detail and presentation (and I haven’t finished the whole thing, even after studying it for over two hours), but an overall conclusion states, in part:
“Projections of current non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies by state—with social distancing mandates reinstated when a threshold of 8 deaths per million population is exceeded (reference scenario)—suggest that, cumulatively, 511,373 (469,578–578,347) lives could be lost to COVID-19 across the United States by 28 February 2021. We find that achieving universal mask use (95% mask use in public) could be sufficient to ameliorate the worst effects of epidemic resurgences in many states. Universal mask use could save an additional 129,574 (85,284–170,867) lives from September 22, 2020 through the end of February 2021, or an additional 95,814 (60,731–133,077) lives assuming a lesser adoption of mask wearing (85%), when compared to the reference scenario.”
Wear your masks, people.
Update – 9:43pm: I see that Twitter is talking about this report.
