Masks do work in reducing Covid infections, Oxford study

While public health officials in Telangana have advocated for usage of masks, a large-scale population-based study taken-up by Oxford researchers in the UK might just convince the skeptics.

Hyderabad: The effectiveness of masks in preventing Covid-19 infections has been much debated throughout the Covid pandemic. While public health officials in Telangana have advocated for usage of masks, a large-scale population-based study taken-up by Oxford researchers in the UK might just convince the skeptics, who often question the efficacy of masks.

The population-based study on the efficacy of masks by researchers from Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, published in BMJ Open on October 25, said that people who wore masks had significantly lower rates of Covid-19 infection.

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The study titled ‘Factors affecting adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 infections in the first year of the pandemic in the UK’, covering 4,09,009 Covid-19 nose and throat swab tests from 72,866 households for 1,00,138 individuals aged between 18 years and 64 years from May 10, 2020 to February 2, 2021,  said that ‘wearing a face covering or mask outside the home consistently and significantly predicted lower infection before the 2020 Christmas period and among women’.

Dr Melinda C Mills from Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, who is one of the researchers in the study, was quoted in the Oxford University website.

“Lack of compliance to Covid behavioral measures has often been  positioned  as  an  attitude or choice. Yet there are large groups of people who, due to their household or employment circumstances, cannot follow measures to work from home, engage in physical distancing at the workplace or avoid public transportation. This, in turn, means that they have a higher exposure to becoming infected,” Dr Melinda said.

“The inability for some groups of people to follow behavioral interventions exacerbates existing health inequalities and we showed that face coverings are one measure that can mitigate this unequal exposure,” the senior Oxford researcher pointed out.

Prof Mills adds, ‘Using a very large individual and household sample and Covid swab tests, we showed that the inability for certain groups such as women in large households or those working in occupations where it is hard to maintain physical distancing were protected from infection during key periods in 2020 in the UK’.

The protective effect of wearing a face covering/mask was the strongest for those who were the most unable to comply with NPIs. Higher infection rates were in younger groups and women in large households. Wearing a face covering or mask outside the home consistently and significantly predicted lower infection before the 2020 Christmas period and among women, the study concluded.

For more details on the study: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-10-27-wearing-face-coverings-protected-wearers-covid-19-infection-large-scale-study and BMJ open link: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/10/e054200

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