A new study recently revealed that face masks are guaranteed to protect one from COVID-19 infection, although not all kids do.

According to a rigorous study published in Nature, surgical masks, specifically are highly protective, but the ones made of cloth fall short.

Face masks shield against COVID-19 infection, and this has been concluded by what's described as a "gold-standard clinical trial" in Bangladesh, which backs up the results of hundreds of past investigational and laboratory studies.

Critics of mask mandates have referred to the lack of important randomized clinical tests, which assigned volunteers at random to either an intervention or control group.

However, the most recent finding is based on a randomized trial that involved almost 350,000 individuals throughout Bangladesh.

The authors of the study discovered that surgical masks, although not cloth masks, lessened the spread of COVID-19 in villages where the researchers distributed face masks and promoted the use of such.

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Surgical Masks Proven Effective

According to infectious disease researcher Ashley Styczynski from Sanford University in California, and a co-author of the preprint that describes the trial, this finding should be "the end of the debate."

The National Library of Medicine also indicated the efficacy of wearing a surgical mask as a protection against COVID-19.

The research is taking things one step further when it comes to scientific rigor, explained medical researcher Deepak Bhatt, at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, author of a published study on masking.

Styczynski, together with her colleagues, started by developing a method for the promotion of mask-wearing, with measures like reminders from health workers in public places.

This eventually tripled the usage of masks, from just 13 percent in control villages to 42 percent in villages where it was promoted.

The study authors then compared the number of cases of COVID-19 in control villages and the treatment communities.

Furthermore, the researchers discovered that the number of asymptomatic cases was lower in treatment villages compared to the ones in control villages.

The drop was a shy nine percent although the study investigators suggested that the actual risk deduction is possibly much greater, partly due to the fact that they did not carry out any COVID-19 testing of people who do not have symptoms, or whose symptoms did not meet the disease's definition of the World Health Organization.

Surgical Mask Vs Cloth Mask

The research associated surgical masks with an 11-percent decline in risk, compared with a five-percent decline for cloth masks. That result was reinforced by laboratory experiments whose findings are summarized in the same preprint.

In addition, according to co-author of the study, economist Mushfiq Mobarak, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the data showed that even following 10 washes, surgical masks are able to filter out roughly 76 percent of tiny particles capable of airborne transmission of COVID-19 infection.

On the contrary, the researchers discovered that three-layered cloth masks comprised a filtration efficacy of just 37 percent before use or washing. Both the laboratory and mask-trial findings are yet to be peer-reviewed.

Prompted to Switch to Use of a Surgical Mask

The study findings prompted infectious disease physician Monica Gandhi, from the University of California, San Francisco to switch to surgical from cloth masks.

She explained, she purchased a surgical mask for herself, "pink ones." The only randomized clinical trial of masking during this global health crisis, that has been published at present, examined the link between the infection status of an individual, and self-reported masking.

Gandhi also said, by randomizing the whole village, the most recent study enhances the assessment of both, adherence to mask-wearing and community-level transmission.

Masks will stay a particularly critical line of defense in Bangladesh, as well as in other low- and middle-income nations, where access to vaccines is restricted to non-existent.

Lastly, Mobarak said, if masking changes the discourse in the United States, where masks are being unnecessarily politicized, that's then "a bonus." 

Related information about testing face masks is shown on CBC News's YouTube video below:

 

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