Please read this analysis of the meta analysis study you are referencing, and report back regarding the reservations expressed here:
A meta-analysis seeks to be the last word on the effectiveness of masks, but finding answers in science isn’t that easy.
www.vox.com
“I think Jefferson — an Oxford University epidemiologist who has a number of eccentric and flatly nonsensical opinions about Covid-19, including that it
didn’t originate in China and may have been circulating in Europe for years before its global emergence — is overstating his case. There is something we can learn from the Cochrane paper, but it’s as much about the process of science as it is about the effectiveness of masks.
First, the reasons I don’t totally buy the Cochrane review’s conclusions:
The review includes 78 studies. Only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, so the bulk of the evidence the Cochrane team took into account wasn’t able to tell us much about what was specifically happening during the worst pandemic in a century.
Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing. Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular.
Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers. If telling people to wear masks doesn’t lead to reduced infections, it may be because masks just don’t work, or it could be because people don’t wear masks when they’re told, or aren’t wearing them correctly.”
www.gavi.org
skepchick.org
www.cdc.gov
