The Impact of Face-Masks on Total Mortality Heterogenous Effects by Gender and Age

  1. Giacomo De Giorgi
  2. Maria Maddalena Speziali
  3. Felix Michalik

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Abstract

Governments around the world have been implementing several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to fight Covid-19 spread and its associated mortality. We estimate the causal impact of mandatory face-mask wearing policy in public places on (total) mortality in Switzerland. We exploit the staggered introduction of the policy across Swiss cantons using a Difference-in-Difference and an event study approach. We find that the extension of compulsory mask wearing to public places has an heterogeneous impact on mortality, with small positive effects on male mortality entirely driven by older age-cohorts (90+). Finally, we show that adding contact tracing and stricter distancing to compulsory face-mask policy does not lead to better results in terms of mortality.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.08.21258545: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.06.08.21258545v1 on medRxiv