If mask is used by all according to guidelines, there would be 5,100 fewer deaths
India’s novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cumulative death toll will be nearly 2.9 million by March 1, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent population health research centre at the University of Washington Medicine in the United States.
IHME brings out periodic COVID-19 situations across the world that are widely referred and quoted. The latest forecast is based on data available on November 1 and was fed into the model on November 2 to get the forecasts.
According to its latest forecast using a model based on many defining datasets, there would be “2,899,000 cumulative total deaths due to COVID-19 on March 1.” So, there would be 79,000 additional deaths from November 1, 2021 to March 1, 2022, the period for which the latest forecast has been made.
This forecast is according to IHME’s “reference scenario”. IHME defines this scenario as “our forecast of what we think is most likely to happen.”
This scenario is based on these assumptions:
Vaccines are distributed at the expected pace. Brand- and variant-specific vaccine efficacy is updated using the latest available information from peer-reviewed publications and other reports. Future mask use is the mean of mask use over the last seven days. Mobility increases as vaccine coverage increases.
The IHME added:
Governments adapt their response by re-imposing social distancing mandates for six weeks whenever daily deaths reach eight per million, unless a location has already spent at least seven of the last 14 days with daily deaths above this rate and not yet re-imposed social distancing mandates. In this case, the reference scenario assumes that mandates are re-imposed when daily deaths reach 15 per million. Variants Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta continue to spread regionally and globally from locations with sufficient transmission.
IHME uses three scenarios including the “reference scenario”. The other two are: The “worse scenario” and the “universal masks scenario”.
The worse scenario has these assumptions:
Hundred per cent of vaccinated individuals stop using masks. Mobility increases in all locations to 25 per cent above the pre-pandemic winter baseline, irrespective of vaccine coverage. Governments are more reluctant to re-impose social distancing mandates, waiting until the daily death rate reaches 15 per million, unless a location has already spent at least seven of the last 14 days with daily deaths above this rate and not yet re-imposed social distancing mandates.
The IHME added:
In this case, the reference scenario assumes that mandates are re-imposed when daily deaths reach 38 per million. In either case, we assume social distancing mandates remain in effect for six weeks. Variants Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta spread between locations twice as fast when compared with our reference scenario.
IHME defines “the universal mask scenario” as all assumptions like in the other two remain same but “assumes all locations reach 95 per cent mask use within seven days.”
Under the worse scenario, IHME forecasts 519,000 cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 by March 1, 2022. This is an additional 51,000 deaths compared to the reference scenario.
In the universal mask scenario, there would be “5,100 fewer cumulative reported deaths compared to the reference scenario on March 1.”
In other assessments, IHME says that though COVID-19 ranks as the 10th most-frequent cause of death in India, the country’s actual deaths from the novel coronavirus are much higher than reported by government agencies. “Estimated total daily deaths due to COVID-19 in the past week were 4.3 times larger than the reported number of deaths,” its analysis said.
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