Personally, I think there would've been less death, but not dramatically less.
At the end of the day, Republicans and Dems are both capitalist and answer to the same overlords, so they still wouldn't have done what actually needed to be done to properly handle it (AKA do what China did).
I'm not sure what they would've done to shave off that 100k? The whole mask thing would've happened anyway for reasons you list.