A new study from Bangladesh that featured more than 340,000 subjects across 600 villages shows the important role masks play in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
The study — published on Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Innovations for Poverty Action — is the largest trial that tests the effectiveness of medical masks since the pandemic began last year.
Many studies have been done in the past to determine the effectiveness of facial coverings, but they have mainly focused on small groups of people in medical settings. The results out of Bangladesh showcase their importance due to the fact that they demonstrate a larger-scale scenario that can’t be mimicked in smaller settings.
“This is really solid data that combines the control of a lab study with real-life actions of people in the world to see if we can get people to wear masks, and if the masks work,” said Laura Kwong, an assistant professor of environment health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the study’s co-author.
Researchers like co-author Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics professor at Yale University, hope that the results from the study demonstrate the reasoning behind mask mandates that many government officials have placed into effect once again as the delta variant spreads across the country.
“The policy question we were trying to answer was: If you can distribute masks and get people to wear them, do they work?” Mobarak said.
The study followed 342,126 randomly selected Bangladeshis for a five-month period beginning last November. The program also called for certain villages to promote the use of wearing masks by distributing them to households at no cost, according to NBC News.
In total, 178,000 people were among the population group urged to wear a mask. This messaging led to a 30% increase in mask wearing for a period of 10 weeks or more. Additionally, mask-wearing caused a nearly 12% reduction in patients experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, and a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence, the measurement of the virus in a blood test.
“A 30% increase in mask-wearing led to a 10% drop in COVID, so imagine if there was a 100% increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100% change,” Mobarak said.
Kwong added that the study’s findings may be beneficial to officials in the U.S. as people in Bangladesh typically spend more time outdoors where the virus doesn’t transmit as easily.
“Right now, places say to cover your face but they don’t say what type of face covering,” she said. “If schools and workplaces and other indoor public spaces are going to mandate masks, they should be working to mandate surgical masks.”
Similar studies led by Kwong and her team are set to take place in villages in other parts of Asia and expand to sub-Saharan Africa as well. As part of their new studies, the group is also seeking to research the effect of masks and asymptomatic transmission.
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