A new study from Bangladesh that surveyed over 340,000 people from 600 villages shows the important role masks play in preventing the spread of Covid-19.
The study - published by nonprofit organization Innovations for Poverty Action - is the largest trial that tests the effectiveness of medical masks since the pandemic began last year.
Many studies have been done in the past to determine the effectiveness of facial coverings, but they have mainly focused on small groups of people in medical settings. The results out of Bangladesh showcase their importance due to the fact that they demonstrate a larger-scale scenario that can't be mimicked in smaller settings.
"This is really solid data that combines the control of a lab study with real-life actions of people in the world to see if we can get people to wear masks, and if the masks work," said Laura Kwong, an assistant professor of environment health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the study's co-author.
Researchers like co-author Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics professor at Yale University, hope that the results demonstrate the reasoning behind mask mandates. "The question we were trying to answer was: if you can distribute masks and get people to wear them, do they work?" he said.
The study followed 342,126 randomly selected Bangladeshis for a five-month period beginning last November. The program also called for certain villages to promote mask-wearing by distributing them for free.
In total, 178,000 people were among the population group urged to wear a mask. This messaging led to a 30 percent increase in mask wearing for a period of 10 weeks or more. Mask-wearing caused a nearly 12 percent reduction in patients experiencing Covid symptoms, and a 9.3 percent reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence - the measurement of the virus in a blood test.
"A 30 percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100 percent increase," Mobarak said.
Similar studies led by Kwong and her team are set to take place in villages in other parts of Asia and expand to sub-Saharan Africa as well. As part of their new studies, the group is also seeking to research the effect of masks and asymptomatic transmission.
New York Daily News (TNS)
