Editorial | Face masks seen as most effective way to limit virus transmission
- With an increasingly grim outlook in the global coronavirus fight, the World Health Organisation’s call for an all-out effort against transmission must be heeded as the search for an effective treatment continues
Having just passed 9 million reported coronavirus cases, the world is on track to reach 10 million within a week – and more than half a million deaths. More than 4 million cases have been reported in the past month. No end to the spiral is in sight. World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says, rightly, that even as research continues into treatments and vaccines, utmost efforts are needed to suppress transmission and save lives.
Evidence continues to mount that wearing a face mask is the most effective way to limit transmission, especially when combined with other personal initiatives like hand hygiene.
The latest example is a Japanese-American international computer study covering more than 20 countries that found masks could reduce the risk of dying from Covid-19, and that the rate of mask wearing was the strongest predictor for the number of deaths per million people. Earlier this month, in a major about face, the WHO recommended wearing face masks on public transport after previously discouraging people from using them.
A surge in infections in the United States and Brazil, the two worst-affected countries, has been put down to people not wearing masks, a bad choice openly advocated by respective presidents Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. That includes a spike in infections after local officials and residents in Orange County defied a Californian government edict that masks must be worn in public.
The computer study, by a team from Miyazawa Clinic in Hyogo and the University of Houston-Victoria in Texas, used data collected by British research company You-Gov, which asked people in more than 20 countries if they wore a face mask in public. The proportion who answered yes ranged from just 21 per cent in hard-hit Britain to more than 90 per cent in some Asian populations, including Hong Kong, which have had fewer infections and deaths.
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The world faces an increasingly grim outlook. Contagion in Brazil is expected to overtake the US. It is surging in India and Mexico. People seem numbed to bad news when strong action is called for. Efforts to establish effective testing regimes, fundamental to breaking the chain of transmission, are leaving much to be desired, particularly in India and Brazil.
