We make a table of the countries with the largest projected deaths on January 1, 2021, by the IHME projections. Some of them seem wildly out of line, but they are probably based on when current restrictions expire. Undoubtedly, most of the countries with few cases will extend restrictions to keep the number of deaths low. Their high death projection should then just serve as a warning of what can happen if they drop all expiring restrictions. Japan and the Philippines are the leading cases of this phenomena. We also show the IHME projections with 95% masking, and the number of lives savable by masking. For current deaths, we use Johns Hopkins data for midday September 5. We order the countries by the projected lives lost on December 1, and go down to 30,000.
| Country | Current Deaths | Projected Deaths | With Masking | Lives Saved |
| India | 69,561 | 659,531 | 484,981 | 174,550 |
| US | 188,274 | 410,451 | 288,381 | 122,070 |
| Brazil | 125,502 | 174,297 | 160,566 | 13,731 |
| Mexico | 66,851 | 138,828 | 130,544 | 8,284 |
| Japan | 1,361 | 120,514 | 104,808 | 15,706 |
| Russia | 17,707 | 94,905 | 26,668 | 68,237 |
| France | 30,730 | 73,743 | 46,622 | 27,121 |
| UK | 41,638 | 69,548 | 59,819 | 9,729 |
| Spain | 29,418 | 69,445 | 66,508 | 2,937 |
| Philippines | 3,790 | 58,412 | 58,030 | 382 |
| Italy | 35,534 | 56,071 | 43,917 | 12,154 |
| Peru | 29,554 | 46,666 | 46,528 | 138 |
| Iran | 22,154 | 46,137 | 28,716 | 17,421 |
| Netherlands | 6,274 | 35,078 | 10,441 | 24,637 |
| Argentina | 9,685 | 33,220 | 30,943 | 2,277 |
| Iraq | 7,422 | 31,181 | 17,195 | 13,986 |
The main lives to be saved overall by masking are in India, the United States, and Russia. They total about 365,000. This is about half of the 770,000 which can be saved world wide by masking. In many countries above, a considerable portion of deaths can be saved by masking.
