Masks made little or no difference to prevent Covid: New research

Three years into the COVID pandemic, there still isn’t a consensus on whether masks protected people against the coronavirus.

A review led by 12 researchers from esteemed universities around the world has said that masking up may have done little to nothing to stop the transmission of Covid-19.

“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference,” the review authors concluded of their work comparing masking with non-masking to prevent influenza or SARS‐CoV‐2. What’s more, even for health care workers providing routine care, “there were no clear differences” between medical or surgical masks versus N95s.

But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The review doesn’t show that masks definitely do not reduce the spread of COVID—only that studies to date have not proven that they do.

The review was published by Cochrane Library and researched 78 controlled trials to check whether “Physical intervention”- including face masks and hand washing curbed the spread. Cochrane Reviews are widely considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine, the Slate report said.

The review author said, “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference.” The researchers compared masking with non-masking to prevent Covid-19.

The study further claimed that there was no clear difference between medical/surgical masks versus N95. The study found that “wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (five studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (five studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (three studies; 7799 people).”

The 78 studies looked at participants from countries of all income levels, Fox News reported.

The researchers collected data during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, non-epidemic flu seasons, epidemic flu seasons up to 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the study authors wrote.