
Mask wearing made Covid death rates 100 times lower than projected - bdcravens
https://www.fastcompany.com/90519909/countries-where-everyone-wears-masks-saw-covid-death-rates-100-times-lower-than-projected
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sfgunn
Not doubting masks help, but do they have an example of a country that refused
to have masks and had a 100x higher death rate?

Seems like many intelligent people have pointed out how the projected death
rates were...unreliable, to say the least.

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rzzzwilson
Surely the US is an example, though there are others. The article mentioned
Thailand. The number of deaths there is still 58 in a population of 70 million
and that number is roughly static. The US at less than 5 times the population
has over 140K deaths and rising. Taiwan, with a population one tenth of the US
has seven deaths.

The US hasn't seen a blanket refusal to wear masks, but if a large enough
proportion of a population don't wear masks then the effect of the masks is
largely negated. This is similar to universal vaccinations, where you need a
large proportion of the population vaccinated to have an appreciable effect.

There certainly can be variations in how different countries attribute and
count deaths, but those differences can't account for the widely varying death
rates we see. Vietnam, for instance, with a population of 95 million and a
shared border with China has zero deaths.

Looks to me like the 100x higher death rate may be a LOW figure in some cases.

