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.
Dr. Juan 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.