Covid-19: Surgical masks found more effective than cloth in largest trial yet

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Sep 10, 2021: As India slowly reels out of the deadly wave of Covid-19, face masks have been the most accessible tool in fighting the virus. New research in Bangladesh backs its effectiveness in controlling the virus outbreak to large extents in rural areas. The latest study will likely put an end to the mask mandate critics in several parts of the world, who have been questioning its effectiveness in tackling SARS-CoV-2.

 

Researchers conducted a randomised control trial on 3,50,000 participants across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh and found that surgical masks helped reduce infections in villages where they had distributed these masks. They found that the symptomatic cases were lower in treatment villages than in control villages.

The research aimed to identify strategies to encourage community-wide mask-wearing and tracking changes in symptomatic Covid infections as a result of our intervention.

The research published in a preprint (yet to be peer reviewed) in Innovations for Poverty Action states, "community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during Covid-19 shows that the intervention tripled mask usage and reduced symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, demonstrating that promoting community mask-wearing can improve public health."

"This really should be the end of the debate. It takes things a step further in terms of scientific rigour," Ashley Styczynski, an infectious disease researcher at Stanford University, a co-author of the preprint, told Nature. The researchers devised strategies to increase mask-wearing habits in the people by promoting its use by community leaders and interventions.

They tested several strategies and used two kinds of masks, reusable surgical and cloth. Researchers focussed on free door-to-door mask distribution, provided information on mask-wearing via video and brochures and reinforced people to wear masks in public. They found that the intervention led to a 9.3 per cent decrease in Covid-19.

"The effect was particularly large for surgical masks and for older populations: Surgical masks prevented 11 per cent Covid-19 and 35 per cent of cases in the 60+ age group. They said that surgical masks have triple-layer polypropylene, which gives it a 95 per cent filtration efficiency, cost around one-fourth of cloth masks, factory production is faster, users in the study reported the "surgical mask was more comfortable, especially in hot and humid weather. Cloth masks also tended to lose smoothness and shine after a few washes."

The randomised trial was conducted between November 2020 and April 2021, months before the deadly second wave triggered by the Delta variant of the coronavirus struck India.

"While vaccines may constrain the spread of Covid-19 in the long-term, it is unlikely that a substantial fraction of the population in low and middle-income countries will have access to vaccines before the end of 2021. Uncovering scalable and effective means of combating Covid-19 is thus of first-order policy importance," the paper said.

The paper added that the need for the research arose amid the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) decision to not recommend mask adoption until June 2020, citing the lack of evidence from community-based randomised controlled trials and concerns that mask-wearing would create a false sense of security.

India registered 43,263 new cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, taking the country’s caseload to 3,31,39,981. As many as 338 deaths due to the infection were also reported in the last 24 hours, according to the data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. On Thursday, the country recorded 14.2 per cent higher cases as compared to Wednesday.

Courtesy:India Today