This reporting was sourced from TPR’s Petrie Dish podcast, hosted by Bioscience and Medicine reporter Bonnie Petrie.
A San Antonio mathematician who has modeled this pandemic since the beginning says more than 1 million people could die of COVID-19 by spring
Juan B. Gutiérrez, chair of the math department at the University of Texas at San Antonio, tracks daily coronavirus cases and predicts how certain events — mask mandates, emergency orders, holidays — will affect transmission regionally and nationally.
“The fear that many people have, what I have computed and at the same estimation for the U.S. unless we communicate that there's risk and (unless) people change behavior, we could be between half a million and 1.2 million deaths by the end of March,” he said.
According to the COVID Tracking Project, around 3,000 Americans are currently dying of COVID-19 every day. Gutiérrez says if people don’t wear masks and stay home over the holidays, that number could go as high as 6,000 in a single day.
If people change their behavior, Gutiérrez projects the U.S. might be able to remain under 500,000 deaths. There have been more than 300,000 deaths as of Monday.
“It's a horrible loss. People who shouldn't have to die will die unless we take action. We have to tell people this is real,” he said. “This is a disease. It has the potential to decrease the life expectancy of the human species.”
Exactly a month ago we posted a projection for the US, showing that we could have a 50% increase in cases in December, compared to October 1st. Sadly, the projections of model are right on track. This is a tragedy that did not have to happen. Thousands are dying every week. https://t.co/oIqQzZNmgj
— Juan B. Gutiérrez, PhD (@biomathematicus) November 1, 2020
Vaccines are now being doled out across the nation, but Gutiérrez said there are other ways to reduce risk. They’re the same precautions that have been repeated since the crisis began.
“From a mathematical point of view, there are points that we can control easily in absence of a vaccine. Those are the contact rates between infected people and susceptible people and government interventions, because that changes the behavior of people,” he said. “So the contact rates are decreased when people wear masks, that is the probability that an infected person infects a susceptible person is decreased by decreasing the number of pathogens that are floating in the air.”
On top of that, decreasing the number of face-to-face contacts and indoor gatherings will also help.
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