Massive Study Proves Yet Again: Masks Stop COVID Spread
In the early days of the pandemic, we were shocked to see anti-maskers in the U.S. demanding their right to breathe freely without a piece of cloth hindering them. One of their main arguments was that masks don’t really prevent the spread of coronavirus.
A massive study has proven them all wrong: Masks work.
The study, which was done in Bangladesh, incidentally one of the hardest-hit countries by the pandemic, involved 340,000 adults. It aimed to measure the impact of community masking on the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
The study compared results from villages that did not wear masks with villages that wore masks.
According to the study, the village that was asked to wear masks had a significant decrease in the prevalence of COVID-19. The masked group saw a 9.3 percent reduction in the people who tested positive for the virus. This also led to an 11.9 percent reduction in COVID-19 symptoms.
But there’s another facet to the study: Surgical masks are better than cloth masks.
Villages that wore surgical masks had a significantly better reduction rate than villages that used cloth masks. According to the study, the surgical mask group had a 13.6 percent relative reduction in COVID-19 prevalence, while the cloth mask group had an 8.5 percent relative reduction.
The study is under peer review with the journal Science, but was made accessible to journalists because of its potential impact on public health policies.
Source:
Abaluck, et al. (2021). "Massive Study Proves It Yet Again: Masks Stop COVID Spread." Retrieved from https://bit.ly/MaskStudy on September 02, 2021.
