Wearing Masks Will Increase Mortality !!
To relate the impact of these interventions to their societal impact, we determined the number of deaths per million after each mitigation strategy, assuming a mortality rate of ~ 3%39. This analysis illustrates the heavy cost of lives of the virus, but also demonstrates that according to our model a high level of mask wearing compliance is the most effective non-pharmacological approach to protect human lives, particularly when combined with even moderate SD measures (Fig. 4D). In contrast, SD, without masks wearing is not effective to reduce mortality (Fig. 4E). Finally, our simulations predict that increasing the proportion of the population wearing masks will increase the time to outbreak extinction (from ~ 40 to ~ 60 days) (Fig. 4F). Together with the broadening of the peak (Fig. 4C), this shows an effective flattening of the curve. Importantly, with 80% mask wearing, we observed an increase in the statistical distribution from the average time to extinction (Fig. 4F, see 95% confidence intervals). Thus, a generally low disease incidence triggers stochastic events leading to extinction of the infection.