STUDY: US Response Cost Nearly 400K COVID Deaths

Reuters reports:

The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.

That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.

U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

Read the full article. The study projects an eventual 670,000 US deaths due to coronavirus.

Stronger U.S. COVID response by Trump Administration could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths, research shows https://t.co/0pTMNT901h

— Jon Cooper ?? (@joncoopertweets) March 25, 2021