300,000 Deaths By December? 9 Takeaways From The Newest COVID-19 Projections

By Dec. 1, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 could reach nearly 300,000. That's the grim new projection from researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — one of the more prominent teams modeling the pandemic. The new forecast, released Thursday, projects that between now and December, 137,000 people will die on top of the roughly 160,000 who have died so far.

NPR spoke with the head of IHME's team, Chris Murray, as well as with Nicholas Reich, of University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has set up a system for comparing 26 different U.S. forecasts.

Here are nine takeaways to help make sense of the projections: