The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study

Authored by globalnews.ca and submitted by goodoneforyou

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Some countries have been devastated by the novel coronavirus, and others have escaped lightly.

Why the extreme differences? The main one is that countries that quickly resorted to widespread mask-wearing had far lower death rates and shorter outbreaks, a new study argues.

The authors looked at coronavirus death rates in 198 countries, trying to see why some had painfully high death rates and others very low.

“What we found was that of the big variables that you can control which influence mortality, one was wearing masks,” says Christopher Leffler of Virginia Commonwealth University, one of the study’s authors.

“If you wore masks early in your outbreak, you had much lower mortality. Tweet This

“It wasn’t just by a few per cent, it was up to a hundred times less mortality. The countries that introduced masks from the very beginning of their outbreak have had hardly any deaths.”

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Most of the countries that had low death rates were in East Asia, especially South Korea and Japan.

“You also have Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau — there are lots of countries that used masks early on. Vietnam and Thailand are good examples — they’ve kept per capita mortality very low,” Leffler says.

A superspreader event at a church in South Korea supports the argument, he says, since the people at that gathering weren’t wearing masks.

Outside East Asia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic moved to require masks early on and had low death rates as a result, Leffler argues.

“If you look at Latin America, Venezuela is an example where the very first day that they confirmed a case, the president demonstrated how to wear a mask on television. You can find around the world examples from many regions.”

Venezuela has so far avoided the worst of the virus, suffering far less than neighbouring Brazil.

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Masks worn by ordinary people, perhaps improvised from fabric that people happen to have around, are still helpful even if they’re worn much less strictly than masks in a hospital, he says. What’s important is that a critical mass of people wear some kind of mask, especially indoors.

“It’s important to understand that the masks don’t have to be perfect. If everybody wears them and they only block half of the transmission, this has an enormous effect at a population level.” Tweet This

A Cambridge University study released earlier this month reached similar conclusions.

“Research shows that even homemade masks made from cotton T-shirts or dishcloths can prove 90 per cent effective at preventing transmission,” it argued.

“Crude homemade masks primarily reduce disease spread by catching the wearer’s own virus particles, breathed directly into fabric, whereas inhaled air is often sucked in around the exposed sides of the mask.”

Simple cloth masks have a long history in the West during times of respiratory disease going back to the 1918 flu epidemic, Leffler says.

“In North America, where the virus is circulating, mask-wearing is the most important thing that could be done to get this under control.”

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gojyappe on June 23rd, 2020 at 05:10 UTC »

Japan resident here. Our government response was slow and woefully inadequate. Considering its population density and the distancing guidelines of only 3 feet in Japan, Tokyo should have been in much worse shape than NYC right now -- I'm convinced that mask wearing is the single biggest reason it isn't.

Edit: this comment got more traction than I expected. In case anyone’s interested, here is a good site to see Japan’s COVID numbers, updated daily. (And no, we are not testing nearly enough.)

https://covid19japan.com/

Roygbiv0415 on June 23rd, 2020 at 04:18 UTC »

Taiwan did:

Had a stockpile of masks accumulated over a decade Released part of said stock over the Chinese New Year, when mask factories are closed, to prevent price gouging Requested mask factories to return to full production ASAP with the help of the military Banned all exports of masks Expropriated all mask production to be centrally distributed Created a system for rationing and distribution of masks Set aside US$6 million from emergency funds to purchase equipment for 60 mask production lines from abroad, and given them to mask producers in exchange for an equivalent value of masks.

All of the above, before the end of January.

Interestingly though, masks weren't mandatory until April, when the new mask production lines came online and a reasonable amount of masks were available for distribution (roughly 5 every 14 days per person). The populace had mostly been wearing masks in public anyhow.

kittybarofskee on June 23rd, 2020 at 02:40 UTC »

Surgeon General Jerome Adams has disappeared and never apologized or explained why he mocked people who were wearing masks. He said “Seriously People! stop buying masks. They are not effective for the general public.” He knew, or should have known, this was not true.