Top Coronavirus Model Now Predicts 410,000 U.S. Deaths By Year’s End

A key predictive model used by the White House coronavirus task force now predicts the U.S. death toll could likely be 410,000 by January 1, 2021 — and up to 620,000 if the U.S. pursued a “herd immunity” strategy.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation revised its projections Friday to predict that under current expected conditions, U.S. deaths from coronavirus will reach 410,000 by year’s end, and climb to 3,000 deaths per day by December.

The model also predicts that if coronavirus mandates are “eased,” a n=much higher death toll of 610,000 is likely. But if the U.S. adopts 95 percent mask compliance, the death toll would be 288,000 on January 1 — 122,000 fewer than the current projection.

IHME

The new projection comes as the U.S. death toll nears 190,000, and just hours after President Donald Trump attacked both former Vice President Joe Biden and Utah Senator Mitt Romney at a campaign rally for wearing masks in public to prevent the spread of infections.

On CNN Friday morning, Dr. Sanjay Gupta reacted with alarm at the new projections, and described a conversation he had with Dr. Anthony Fauci about the new prediction, which is based on

“A convergence of frustration, I think,” Dr. Gupta said of Fauci’s reaction. “He basically says, look, this is one of those things where we have seen a significant amount of coronavirus fatigue in this country and it’s, you know, there’s other countries around the world that have sort of gotten through this and brought the numbers down. We sort of did these half measures for a period of time and now we’re fatigued of doing some of the basic public health measures.”

He called the new projections “sobering.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.