The impact of mask-wearing in mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during the early phases of the pandemic
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Abstract
Masks have been widely recommended as a precaution against COVID-19 transmission. Several studies have shown the efficacy of masks at reducing droplet dispersion in lab settings. However, during the early phases of the pandemic, the usage of masks varied widely across countries. Using individual response data from the Imperial College London—YouGov personal measures survey, this study investigates the effect of mask use within a country on the spread of COVID-19. The survey shows that mask-wearing exhibits substantial variations across countries and over time during the pandemic’s early phase. We use a reduced form econometric model to relate population-wide variation in mask-wearing to the growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases. The results indicate that mask-wearing plays an important role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Widespread mask-wearing associates with an expected 7% (95% CI: 3.94%—9.99%) decline in the growth rate of daily active cases of COVID-19 in the country. This daily decline equates to an expected 88.5% drop in daily active cases over 30 days compared to zero percent mask-wearing, all else held equal. The decline in daily growth rate due to the combined effect of mask-wearing, reduced outdoor mobility, and non-pharmaceutical interventions averages 28.1% (95% CI: 24.2%-32%).
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.11.20192971: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: This study has several limitations. First, countries enacted multiple NPIs simultaneously. This precludes us from identifying the effectiveness of NPIs separately. Second, the mobility data provided by Google and Apple are only indicative of the relative changes from a benchmark, so their association with disease spread should be interpreted with precaution. Third, even though we consider multiple NPIs and mobility …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.11.20192971: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: This study has several limitations. First, countries enacted multiple NPIs simultaneously. This precludes us from identifying the effectiveness of NPIs separately. Second, the mobility data provided by Google and Apple are only indicative of the relative changes from a benchmark, so their association with disease spread should be interpreted with precaution. Third, even though we consider multiple NPIs and mobility measures and control for population-wide awareness, testing, and country and time differences, there could be several variables that we do not or cannot include due to the lack of data. For example, one of the NPIs we consider relates to health announcements (e.g., handwashing, coughing into one’s elbow, etc.). However, the model only notes the NPI and not the adoption of these practices in the general population. While some data (e.g. sale of soap, cleansers, etc.) could approximate this, multiple confounding variables still exist and thus limit the extent to which we can apply any causal interpretation of the results. We attempt to provide better insights using a control function approach, however, stop short of making causal claims. Fourth, our analysis was conducted at the country level due to data restrictions. However, mask usage, mobility changes as well as the implementation of NPIs most likely vary within the country. Nevertheless, the analyses in this study are helpful at understanding the practical implementation of mask usage policy within ...
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.
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