The coronavirus has surged dramatically over the past month, with average daily cases reaching 150K over the past week. As the weather gets cooler and people socialize more indoors, public health officials are bracing for a further spikes, particularly after Thanksgiving.
Even at the current rate, the widely cited IHME model projects 371,000-587,000 deaths by Mar 1, 2021 under different scenarios:
Mandates easing: 587k (475k-712k)
Current trajectory: 439k (402k-481k)
Universal masks: 371k (336k-402k)
To put things into perspective, Covid-19 will almost certainly end up as the third biggest cause of deaths in the US in 2020 after heart diseases and cancer, based on data from the CDC. (Non-Covid attributions are from the most recently available year, 2017):
And (if there was any doubt) Covid-19 is far more dangerous than influenza, according to a new CDC study. That's certainly the case on an absolute basis. Over the past decade the flu has claimed, on average, about 37,000 lives per year. The worst was the 2017-18 season, when 61,000 people died. By comparison, Covid-19 has claimed nearly 7x more lives this year based on data from Johns Hopkins (as of 11/14/2020)
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