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Half a million deaths by the end of February? Current COVID-19 strategies have the US headed in that direction, experts say - USA TODAY
Oct 23, 2020 1 min, 30 secs

Researchers from the University of Washington also found that wearing masks in public to prevent COVID-19 spread could save nearly 130,000 lives.

surpassed 220,000 COVID-19 deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance about wearing masks while traveling.

Researchers from the University of Washington's School of Medicine predicted that current state strategies surrounding social distancing, phased reopenings and mask mandates could lead to 511,373 deaths by Feb. 28, 2021, according to a study published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine.

"We are heading into a very substantial fall-winter surge," said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington's School of Medicine.

Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine and infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said it's unfortunate that in the U.S.

wearing a face mask has become a political or emotional issue rather than a scientific principle.

“Short of taking humans, putting a mask on them and then spraying them with SARS-CoV-2, which would be absolutely unfeasible and unethical, this study is very thorough and nicely done,” Gandhi said.

Bob Bednarczyk, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said Americans may be getting lax as the pandemic drags on. .

'They can influence us': Celebrities aren't all wearing masks in public, but they should be.

There's solid data showing that wearing a face mask protects the person wearing it from getting COVID-19 and protects those around them from getting the disease if the wearer is infected

"If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really do think over the next 4-6-8 weeks, I really think we can bring this under control," he said during an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

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