[sfgunn]

Not doubting masks help, but do they have an example of a country that refused to have masks and had a 100x higher death rate?

Seems like many intelligent people have pointed out how the projected death rates were...unreliable, to say the least.

[rzzzwilson]

Surely the US is an example, though there are others. The article mentioned Thailand. The number of deaths there is still 58 in a population of 70 million and that number is roughly static. The US at less than 5 times the population has over 140K deaths and rising. Taiwan, with a population one tenth of the US has seven deaths.

The US hasn't seen a blanket refusal to wear masks, but if a large enough proportion of a population don't wear masks then the effect of the masks is largely negated. This is similar to universal vaccinations, where you need a large proportion of the population vaccinated to have an appreciable effect.

There certainly can be variations in how different countries attribute and count deaths, but those differences can't account for the widely varying death rates we see. Vietnam, for instance, with a population of 95 million and a shared border with China has zero deaths.

Looks to me like the 100x higher death rate may be a LOW figure in some cases.