We look at the Reported and Excess Death tallies today in the IHME model. We then look at both for November 1, three months from now, with the highly transmissible Delta Variant dominant. We then examine the lives savable by 95% masking in the IHME model. Unfortunately, this has been turned into a political football, without even looking at the numbers.
The Reproductive Number R0 is the average number of people an infected person will infect, when the virus is new, before prevention factors have been put into place. For the Delta Variant, this is reported in the talk to the CDC as ranging from 5 to 9. The effective number R or Re is the Reproductive number after mitigation has been put into place, and varies with areas and perhaps other demographics. In the IHME model, this varies by state, and is mostly below 1.5.
Florida is listed as having 20% of US cases of about 15,000 a day over the last week’s average. However, the IHME Estimated Cases for Florida is about 75,000 a day, or 5 times as many.
We look at the four largest states, California (40 million), Texas (30m), Florida (20m), and New York (20m). They total 110 million, or a third of the US population. Here is a table of the table of the four States, the August 1 values of Recorded and Excess Deaths, the November 1 projections of Recorded and Excess Deaths, and the number of Excess Lives saved by 95% masking.
| State | Aug. 1 Reported | Aug. 1 Excess | Nov. 1 Reported | Nov. 1 Excess | Excess Savable |
| CA | 64,332 | 119,239 | 74,459 | 138,010 | 15,702 |
| TX | 53,138 | 87,744 | 60,632 | 100,119 | 7,199 |
| FL | 39,065 | 54,507 | 46,424 | 64,776 | 4,483 |
| NY | 53,760 | 64,977 | 55,618 | 67,223 | 1,782 |
For the four states, the savable lives by 95% masking totals 29,166, which is 67% or 2/3 of the 43,661 Excess deaths projected.
Readers new to the IHME Excess Deaths projections may be amazed that they almost double the California deaths. For California, subtracting Nov. 1 Excess from Aug. 1 Excess gives 18,771 more deaths, so the lives savable, 15,702, is 84% of new deaths. For Texas, the new Excess Deaths are projected as 12,375, and the 7,199 savable by masking are 58%. For Florida, doing the same gives 10,269 more Excess deaths, and the 4,483 savable by masking is 44% of new deaths. For New York, the 1,782 savable by masking are 79% of the 2,246 new Excess deaths projected.
The projections may be before the CDC report was leaked, before California and New York imposed the indoor masking, and before Florida’s DeSantis ruled out state and local masking impositions.
August 2nd update: About half of new cases are in five states: Florida 19.2%, Texas 11.7%, California 11.5%, Louisiana 5%, and Georgia 3.7%. The 7 day average of new cases in the US is 80,000 a day. That is up 54% from a week ago. Florida’s daily average last week is 15,000 cases a day.
The Biden goal of even single adult vaccinations of 70% has now been reached.
An epidemiologist on CNN was saying that with the Delta Variant, herd immunity would now require 90-95% of people be vaccinated.
The new cases last week were just shown on CNN.
