https://www.theatlantic.com/id...ng-all-along/619989/

"If only we had something almost like this for, say, masking: a careful, randomized, real-world experiment on the effect of masks.

Well, now we have it. This week, a group of scientists from Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other institutions published the final results of a randomized study of community-wide masking behavior in Bangladesh. The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages. The researchers randomly selected certain villages for an intervention that included giving out free masks, paying villagers to remind people to cover their face, and having village leaders and religious figures such as imams emphasize the importance of masks. The researchers also paid villagers to count properly worn masks in public places, including markets and mosques. To gather data on coronavirus transmission, the team asked about symptoms and conducted blood tests to determine who came down with COVID-19 over the course of the study."

"But the Bangladesh study is still perhaps the most important research done during the pandemic outside of the vaccine clinical trials, because it gives us randomized-trial data to bolster the flimsier assumptions and conclusions of observational research. We finally have a sense of not just whether masks work but how much universal masking could reduce transmission. The answer is: quite a lot."

We've been talking about this on econ twitter for days.

The two lead authors are economists at Yale. Nice that the article just says, "a group of scientists."

Are the surgical masks referenced in the article the same one sim thinking of, the lie kind? This quote makes me wonder:

quote:

surgical masks were more efficient, even after being washed 10 times with soap and water.

Can those masks really be washed??

One of the authors got a chance to speak extensively on NPR ...

Mobarak on NPR describing the project

I wondered about the "washing" too, so I looked at the paper. These surgical masks that they distributed aren't the paper ones most of us use. They are washable.

quote:

The surgical mask had three layers of 100% non-woven polypropylene (the exterior and interiors were spunbond and the middle layer was meltblown), elastic ear loops, and a nose bridge. The filtration efficiency was 37% (standard deviation [SD] = 6%) for the cloth masks, and 95% (SD = 1%) for the surgical masks (manuscript forthcoming). The filtration efficiency of the surgical masks after washing them 10 times with bar soap and water was 76% (manuscript forthcoming). Surgical masks were outfitted with a sticker that had a logo of a mask with an outline of the Bangladeshi flag and a phrase in Bengali that noted the mask could be washed and reused.