‘Gold Standard’ Review Claims Masks Could Be Only 5% Effective In Community, Gets Slammed

According to Analyse The following are the “gold standard” According to evidence-based reviews and other research, N95/P2 respirators or medical/surgical masks may not be effective in preventing the spread of respiratory viruses.

The Cochrane Institute reviewed 78 studies from around the world, and updated its review in 2020. They discovered that wearing a mask to a community is not a good idea. The risk is reduced According to The CDC, the chance of contracting flu or COVID like illness is a paltry 5%. The Daily Mail.

“Irrespective of the limitations of the study, its results indicate that the true impact of medical/surgical masks and N95/P2 respirators on the transmission of respiratory viruses is at best small,” Francois Balloux is a professor of computational biology at University College London. Reacted.

But Eberhard Bodenschatz, professor of Physics and director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, countered, “The Cochrane study is not very meaningful. … Our studies have clearly shown that masks are physically wonderful protection.”

Bodenschatz lambasted the authors of this study, saying: “In one sentence they write that masks don’t work, and a paragraph later they admit that they can’t really say it.”

During the COVID pandemic in Mexico, researchers ran six trials. Two were from Mexico, one from England and one from Denmark.

“We included 12 trials (10 cluster‐RCTs) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and 10 in the community),” Researchers wrote. “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.”

“The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions,” The researchers acknowledged, and also added: “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.”

Researchers suggested that masks may not have the desired effect. “poor study design; insufficiently powered studies arising from low viral circulation in some studies; lower adherence with mask wearing, especially amongst children; quality of the masks used; self‐contamination of the mask by hands; lack of protection from eye exposure from respiratory droplets (allowing a route of entry of respiratory viruses into the nose via the lacrimal duct); saturation of masks with saliva from extended use (promoting virus survival in proteinaceous material); and possible risk compensation behavior leading to an exaggerated sense of security.”

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases