Impact of community masking on COVID-19

I find legislation that prevents mask mandates or requirements to be extremely irresponsible and abhorrent. These are made without regards to public safety and in contradiction to overwhelming scientific evidence that showed that wearing proper mask is one of the most effective means to reduce the risk of the spread of COVID-19.

I have presented several posts on this blog on the various scientific studies in support of this. Now comes another one that leave no doubt on the effectiveness of masking in reducing the virus transmission. This was very recently published in Science (a very prestigious and difficult journal to publish in, if you don't know this already), and is done across several villages and on a population of more than 300,000 adults in Bangladesh.

We designed our trial to encourage universal mask-wearing at the community level, rather than mask-wearing among only those with symptoms. We encouraged even healthy individuals to wear masks since a substantial share of COVID-19 transmission stems from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals, and masks may protect healthy wearers by reducing the inhalation of aerosols or droplets.

When you read this paper, keep this in mind. It is one thing to show scientifically of how masks reduces the spread of aerosols from our mouth and nose. This has been shown clearly and without any doubt base on the many publications and studies that I have highlighted so far. But it is another to show that it does have an impact STATISTICALLY when applied to large population. This latter part is more difficult because it involves a lot of variables. It is why this latest study is very important because it is one of the larger sampling of human population involved in masking (or lack thereof) to reduce the spread of the virus.

The sign of a valid idea is that the more you study it, the more convincing it becomes. Pseudosciences lack this kind of progression, where they continue to struggle getting to First base to prove that such-and-such even exists. In the case of the effectiveness of wearing proper mask to reduce COVID-19 transmission, the more we study it, the more the evidence we gather to point this to be valid, that wearing mask has been shown unequivocally to reduce the risk of the virus transmission.

Zz.