New IHME model predicts more than 147,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by early August

-A newly revised coronavirus mortality model predicts more than 147,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by early August , up nearly 10,000 from the last projection, as restrictions for curbing the pandemic are relaxed, researchers said on Tuesday. The latest forecast from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) reflects “key drivers of viral transmission like changes in testing and mobility, as well as easing of distancing policies,” the report said.

The projections are presented as a range, with the latest forecast – 147,000-plus deaths – representing the average between a best-case scenario of 102,783 lives lost and a worst-case scenario of 223,489 fatalities. The forecasts have fluctuated over the past couple of months, with a projected death toll as low as 60,000 on April 18.

You must know that that graph is fallacious as regards an argument for masks, for Over half of all U.S. coronavirus deaths have occurred in just 5 states. The majority of those have occurred in New York State. Of the nearly 80,000 deaths from the virus in this country as of Saturday afternoon, nearly 48,700, or about 60 percent, had occurred in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Which of these states does not advise wearing masks? And in fact, while your (dated? and very selective) chart lists the USA and Germany as being a countries in which wearing masks is not advised, our Fed gov, has advisedjust that, and "on April 22, Germany became the latest European country to make the wearing of face masks compulsory when on public transport and while shopping in all of its 16 states.' (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/countries-wearing-face-masks-compulsory-200423094510867.html) In addition, total deaths is meaningless in this regard, for it is the % of deaths of the whole population that matters. If you want to go by just numbers, than Lesotho wins. Thus you are posting propaganda.

Meanwhile, even 147,000 CV deaths will not suffice to warrant the extreme measure advocated for it, for consider that Asian flu pandemic of 1957-1958 resulted in a estimated 116,000 deaths in America (followed by the Hong Kong flu with about est. 100,000 American deaths in 1968–69), when at 171,984,000, the population size in 57-58 was about half of what it is now (330,541,000, rounded figures). Meaning that not only was the infection death rate much higher than for COVID-19, but there would have to be about 200,000 COVID-19 est. deaths to be comparable to the Asian flu. Yet that would simply make it basically equal as concerns the numbers of deaths in proportion to population size, but to justify the CovidCaptivity, one would have to argue that the Asian flu should have necessitated a response like that to COVID-19. The Soviets would have favored that for sure.

The question then is, where was the response in 57-58 comparative to COVID-19 in proportion to its threat? Yes, the 116,000 deaths in America to the Asian flu was for the whole year, yet even if we reach about 200,000 deaths (we pray not) for COVID-19 then the extremely restrictive all-ages response to COVID-19 simply has no precedent in American history, except to a degree with the far more deadly (550,000 to 675,000 Americans, or 0.66% of the population) 1918 flu.

And yet we read ,

This is how the Pasadena Merchants and Standard-Murphys played a game in the Southern California Winter League on January 26, 1919. The influenza epidemic that had started the previous year was spreading, and California was concerned. Pasadena had started requiring residents to wear masks in public; on the first day that the rule went into effect, the city made 60 arrests to show that the new law was for real. So how does a baseball team operate under these regulations? Simple: Just make everyone wear a mask. Per the Los Angeles Times, “even when sliding for bases, the runners managed to keep the cloth over their noses and mouths.”

This was not how most baseball teams addressed the flu. While the MLB season was cut a few weeks short in 1918, that was due less to the outbreak and more to World War I, and it started back on schedule in 1919. But MLB went without any formal protocol about how to handle the outbreak, with no serious talk of canceled games or empty stadiums, and baseball went on, even as the illness came for some of its key figures...

And as for the 1919 Pasadena Merchants, they appear to be an outlier. While flu masks were common during the outbreak of 1918, there’s not much record of other baseball teams with them, and Pasadena received national press for the novelty of “the masked ballgame.” (Emma Baccellieri; https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/03/09/coronavirus-baseball-history)

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