Massive foreign study: Yes, masks really do reduce the spread of COVID (at least among older people) HotAir

Why the excitement? It s because the researchers involved not only managed to pull off a randomized mask study that involved a control group, the gold standard of scientific analysis, but they did it on a humongous scale. They took blood from 350,000 people in rural Bangladesh to see who had already had COVID, then they began encouraging mask-wearing among half of that population handing out free masks, offering info on the importance of masking, getting community leaders to set an example by masking up, even performing in-person reminders for eight weeks. They had observers in those villages keep tabs on how many people were wearing masks and how many weren t. It turned out that in the control population just 13.3 percent wore masks while 42.3 percent wore them in the pro-mask population. Then they took blood samples again from everyone in both groups who d had COVID-like symptoms during the study to see how many in each community had been infected since the first sampling.

Result: The aggressive effort to promote masking paid off. The pro-mask population had less spread of COVID than the control population did. The effect was especially sharp among older (i.e. middle-aged) Bangladeshis and even more so when they wore surgical masks instead of cloth masks.

via hotair.com