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Vanity Fair notes:
The day before yesterday, 21 people died of COVID-19 in Japan. In the United States, 2,129 died. Comparing overall death rates for the two countries offers an even starker point of comparison with total U.S. deaths now at a staggering 80,252 (as of 5/10/20) and Japan’s fatalities at 577. Japan’s population is about 38% of the U.S., but even adjusting for population, the Japanese death rate is a mere 2% of America’s.
This comes despite Japan having no lock-down, still-active subways, and many businesses that have remained open—reportedly including karaoke bars, although Japanese citizens and industries are practicing social distancing where they can. Nor have the Japanese broadly embraced contact tracing, a practice by which health authorities identify someone who has been infected and then attempt to identify everyone that person might have interacted with—and potentially infected. So how does Japan do it?
“One reason is that nearly everyone there is wearing a mask,” said UC Berkeley computer scientist De Kai, the chief architect of an in-depth joint study with Hong Kong University.
Kai’s study suggests that every one of us should be wearing a mask – be it homemade, surgical, scarf or bandana, like the Japanese are doing along with other (mostly East Asian) countries
80% of Americans were to wear a mask, COVID-19 infections would drop by more than 90%.
Kai built a forecasting computer model called the masksim simulator, which uses sophisticated models used by epidemiologists to track outbreaks of various pathogens such as SARS, Ebola and COVID-19, and simulate the effect of wearing masks on infection rates
This is a very informative piece, you can read the article in detail here
In general the numbers from Japan are impressive, 126.5 million people, 16,000 cases, 624 deaths. Without a lock-down or disruption of their economy, the masks just might be the deciding factor
